The Duran Podcast - Foreign policy HUBRIS and MAGA division w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Foreign policy HUBRIS and MAGA division w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

All right, we are live with Alexander McCurice in London and joining us on the Duran, the one and only the great Mr. Robert Barnes. Robert, how you doing? Where can people follow your work? Sure. So for all the law and geopolitics analysis covering the U.S. and the world, Viva Barneslaw. dotlocals.com, second only to the durand. Dotlogos.com of a locals community.

also for election predictions and global sports predictions as well that's at sportspics dot locals.com the Cypriot team paid off again recently so you know go Paphos the and those are the two main places to follow all the content fantastic I will have those as as links in the description box down below and when the live stream is over I will have all those links as a pinned comment And a quick shout out to everyone that is watching us on Rockfin, Odyssey, Rumble, YouTube, and the durand.orgas.com. And a big shout out and the thank you to our moderators in the house, Arielle. And Peter are with us moderating in the chat for the moment. And Robert Alexander, let's talk about hubris. Let's talk about hubris.

Alexander, Robert, to the floor is yours. Well, any, let's indeed talk about hubris, but let's also talk about nemesis because the one follows the other, but we're going to go it the other way around today, I think, I think, because we can start with the nemesis and there is nobody better

to discuss American election results in the world than with the great Robert Barnes who was with us. And we have had a series of elections, not many elections, but important elections, in the United States, And they might be a clue as to how things are going.

They might give us a sense of where feelings of people, real voters, is at this moment and time in the United States. And I'm going to say straight away that I think that the elections were bad news for the president of the United States. I think that it's becoming increasingly clear to me that he, he is becoming distant from his own electoral base, from the people who supported him and voted for him and stuck with him through all of his main trials and problems, the period that he had between his presidencies. And I think this shows. And I think it's not just that people are unhappy with the fact that he's distancing himself from them. But I think they also feel that

but they're not seeing that change in their lives, which they expect it, and they're becoming increasingly worried about the policies and the direction of travel of the administration. Now, that's my view, but of course I'm looking at this from far away in London, but Robert is much closer to the ground, and I know no one better, as I said, to give us a granular sense of elections in the United States, and also to discuss this really very strange election in New York, which has attracted a huge amount of attention here in Britain. All the usual people you would expect here are very excited and delighted by this result.

Sadi Khan, the mayor of London, has discovered a kindred spirit in New York. He is probably right about that, but. the way, at least that's my sense. But anyway, Robert, over to you. Tell us about these results. Are they what I think? Yes, we had off-year elections, special elections, in some cases, regular elections and others. And the high profile was for governor of New Jersey, governor of Virginia, and mayor of New York City. But there are also elections for legislative office in Virginia and New Jersey and city council office in New York City. There are also elections for a range of offices, local offices, judicial offices in Pennsylvania, mayor's elections in Miami,

special district elections in Texas, special referendums in California. And normally, even if the party in power is unpopular, that only translates to maybe the Virginia governor's race. It rarely, you really see what people colloquially here call a wave election, an election where anger at the incumbent party or support for the opposition party is so overwhelming that it drowns out all local issues. Famous Congressman Tip O'Neill said all politics is local. Normally that's the case when you're talking about sheriff,

when you're talking about the local prosecutor, when you're talking about town counselor, when you're talking about school board member, when you're talking about local mayor and the like. And even state legislative districts have shown a disconnect between what's happening in their district and what's happening at, say, the statewide level. What happened last Tuesday here in the United States in 2025 has rarely ever been seen in American history. A wave election so consuming a tsunami of air. anger and rage at the incumbent party, in this case, the Republican Party and the Trump presidency,

that it swept out office holders who had been in power for decades, who had survived every past wave election. Not only that, you had offices flip to the Democratic Party that had been in Republican hands for over a hundred years. That was the scale and scope of it. The city of Miami, which has been trending heavily Republican with its heavy Cuban population, is now on the verge of electing a Democratic mayor for the first time in more than a quarter century. In Texas, a special legislative district that is based on all of the congressional redistricting in Texas, which presumed that Trump's massive inroads with Mexican-American voters would continue as a Republican trend, completely reversed. Indeed, everywhere in the country, there was a substantial Asian population,

Mexican-American population, Puerto Rican population, any African-American population, any of those groups where Trump made double-digit inroads, in some cases, 20, 30, 40-point inroads improvement off of his 2016 and especially the Romney 2012 numbers, all reversed. Indeed, they end up being more democratic than they were before Trump ever stepped onto the scene. It was, as you went down the income scale, you went up the political revolt scale. So there were some precincts that are completely happy with Trump. The precinct where they filmed the show Sopranos, the mob, they like Trump. So the mob's happy, apparently. Some of his, trade tactics, apparently, they fully approved. But other super high income areas, people make over a

quarter of a million dollars, homes valued four million or higher. Those kind of precincts in many places in the country actually showed improvement for Trump. Exit polls and others showed that amongst boomers, Trump is doing just fine. The problem was with literally everyone else, he was getting hammered. He lost what you could call OG MAGA, the 2016 industrial Midwestern voters who joined the first Trump coalition. But he really bled out badly amongst what I called new mega, people who came in in 2024, who were young, working class millennials and zoomers and younger 10xers. who have income under $100,000.

If they have a college degree, it's more of a local college degree than a fancy college degree. Those people went all the way back to the Democratic side. They either stayed home and didn't vote or came out and flipped a flip side. The reaction of the institutional Republican Party was to wave it off. Oh, it's New Jersey. Oh, it's Virginia. Just look at the top of the ticket. Give an idea how bad it was.

an attorney general in Virginia who whose text had leaked the Democratic candidate about how he wanted to murder his opponent and he wanted to murder his opponent's children in front of their mother

and he's running for top law enforcement officer just a few months after Charlie Kirk's murder he got elected to be the Attorney General in the state of Virginia so even incredible scandals that would normally sink anybody didn't have any meaningful consequential effect

Now, so that's what's happening. So there's clear message from the new MAGA and old MAGA that they're extremely unhappy, unhappier than they have ever been with Trump's last six months at the direction the White House has taken. But at the same time, within the Democratic Party, there's going to be some people who misread it because the gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia come from this new national security, spookish candidates. People that work for the CIA, people who work for the Defense Department, national security candidates, as they call them, like Senator CIA, Senator Slectkin and Michigan, et cetera. Both of the governors of New Jersey and Virginia Spanberger and Cheryl are already preparing

their presidential campaigns as we speak. And if people want a model for who these people are, they look indistinguishable from Vander crazy, indistinguishable from Callis. So it's indistinguishable from all of those lunatics. They're the same mindset, same mentality, same approach, and this sudden huge win is going to infuse them with hubris. If you want to know where the Democratic Party base is at, the only real election that gave an indication as to that

was the New York City mayor's race. And while Mamdani, so was Mamdami against Cuomo, the institutional old name liberal, people forget when his dad ran in New York City, against Ed Koch. He ran on vote for Cuomo, not the homo, but they've been putting that in the closet there,

the Cuomo political family. And then the other one is a long-time Guardian Angel Sliwa, which a lot of people were confused by, by his beret and what have you. It was an old Guardian Angel simple from the 70s and 80s when they defended the subways and from crime and what have you. Kind of inspired escape from New York as kind of a film.

Running against Momdani, who grew up and was born in Uganda was part of sort of the Indian migration after the leader there that was brilliantly played by Forrest Whitaker in her film some years ago. Edie Omen. Edelman.

He said him all packing. He said Cash Patel packing, his family packing, sent Mamdani's family packing. His father is a brilliant historian, scholar, analyst, his mother is a well-known filmmaker. Kids got natural political acumen and skill, whatever you think of as ideology. He's a member of the Democratic Socialist of America.

He was accused of saying that he had said globalized the Intifada. What he ran on really was two things. One was a form of America first. It was just New York City first. So when all the candidates were running in the Democratic primary stage, they asked them, which country are you going to visit after you leave once you become elected mayor? And they groveled so fast to the Israel first crowd.

Like, I can't wait to get, oh, Israel, Israel, they're a favorite ally of the greatest country, all that debt. They turn to him down and he says, I'm not going to go anywhere. I'm going to stay in New York City because my job if I get elected is to help New York City. And no one else could understand that in the audience and in the media. The most Jewish city in America, surely you must placate to the Israeli idol, to the bail golden trophy, golden statue. The second thing Mumdami did is you're running old school left populism. So you've got bureaucratic liberalism that has really taken over the institutional parties of the labor left across the Western world. And I describe that as let's tax a bunch of people, let's regulate a bunch of people to benefit a small group of favored people.

You know, we have our oppression Olympics and all that jazz. By contrast, the old populist left has been. Let's tax a few people. Let's regulate a few people to benefit a lot of people. You know, whether you're talking about Huey Long or others, if you go back a century or so, has a rich vein of political support in the United States. Mamdani didn't run on bureaucratic liberalism.

He ran on left populism. He said, let's tax the super rich, the billionaires, and the big corporations of which there are plenty in a place like New York City. And let's have universal programs for transatlantic. Transportation, universal programs for child care, universal programs for health care, universal programs for housing. Now, there are some more controversial aspects. He walked back his old defund the police routine, but he was still promoting, let's send social workers everywhere.

We'll see how that works. I think there's skepticism. But if he dug into the data, the people who are voting for them were two groups. One, newcomers to New York, either the people who weren't born in New York. Now, maybe those were born other parts of the United States, but a good number of them, in fact, many of them, about 40% of them were born outside the United States. So New York City right now is mostly dominated by people who are not born in New York. The people who are native New Yorkers rejected them, the old Italian neighborhoods,

the old Irish neighborhoods, the old Jewish neighborhoods. And boomers in general rejected him. But his support was overwhelming, not only from the foreign born and the newly moved in, but from just young people, period. If you were under, if you were a younger Gen X or millennial or Zoomer, in particular like zoomers and millennials voted for him by 70 and 80 point margins unheard of unprecedented margins not only that they turned out and voted in the mayor's race in new York city at a level they had never turned out what this shows is that on the that the future

is populism whether but it can be right populism or it can just as easily be left populism gorb you know corbin briefly flashed that potential uh and i think it was 2017 i made money on him on that election. I remember. The, or the UK. And the large part of it was because he was at that time, saying he was going to recognize Brexit, so on and so forth.

Then he mishandled the actual management of that. And there's still the Achilles heel of immigration, but it's not an Achilles hill from I'm down in New York. So the, you know, he's a sanctuary city guy of the rest. But on a global national scale, immigration is still a weak point of the populist left, whether it's Melancho in France, whether it was Corbyn and the UK or elsewhere. But the loud screaming signal are people are in economic pain.

People are deeply frustrated by the failures of their elected leaders of both parties, and they seek rebellion and what rebellion? They elected a president on the grounds that he would rebel, and they're seeing just the opposite, so they're rebelling against it. But the future is populism, but whether any of the either institutional parties in America will respect, and absorb the lesson of the Mamdami win, or the Trump administration itself or the Republican Party ever figure out what the 2024 Trump win was about. If they don't, we may go the future of

the UK, where these institutional parties are, their slow, steady decay leads to their elimination overnight. It was a very educational and informative election, if you're paying attention. Absolutely. Just a few things. Firstly, one of the most interesting facts for me about this election, is that the Democrats did so well, it doesn't seem to me as if they're at all popular. I mean, the Democratic Party, as far as I can tell, is even less popular now than it was, say, a year ago. So it's continuing to fall, which is something that really ought to be telling the Republicans and Trump something. I mean, if they are now losing to what is already a deeply unpopular, very, very discredited party, then they are doing something profoundly wrong.

And I think your point about left populism versus right populism, which basically, when we're talking about populism, it means politics, which is about the populace, the people. In other words, it actually relates to their everyday actual concerns. which are legitimate concerns. They are important concerns. And it's what democratic politics is and should be about. Those points are absolutely valid. You see that in Britain.

You see this now in the United States. And one point I would say about in Britain, you talked about the slow decay of the British parties, the establishment parties in Britain. the Labour Party, which is in effect the Democratic Party of Britain. I mean, the Labour Party and the Democratic Party have had very, very close connections with each other going all the way back to the time of Harry Truman. Just to say, I mean, a fact which many people in the United States don't realize the intensity of interactions

at an institutional level between these two parties. Anyway, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party in Britain, we've had a slow decay, but it is now becoming a collapse. Latest opinion polls put them each on 16%. Each reform is on 32%. And of course, reform is a populist right-wing party. And in Britain, well, we don't really have yet a populist left-wing party. But the nearest simulation to it is the new Green Party, led by Zach Polanski, an individual who I think in some ways resembles Mamdani very much.

I can see them very similar. I mean, the same relatively young, very new media, social media, savvy, very similar ideas on many, many topics. Anyway, he's surging for exactly that same reason that Mabdani is searching in New York. That brings us back to the administration, to the president himself, because one of the great qualities

that Donald Trump, the candidate and the politician, always had for me, was this extraordinary connection he seemed to have with the American people. I've said this many times. I used to watch him going out into the, you know, into the United States, into the hinterland,

talking to people there who other politicians didn't talk to. And I've never seen anything like that before in American politics. You've got something like that briefly, to some extent, under Lyndon Johnson, because he also came from working class back,

But really you have to go back to President Kennedy for a president who was as relaxed and as confident and as close to the people of America, the working class people of America, that Trump, as Trump was. And he's lost it. I don't see this connection there anymore. and he's losing his way. And he's losing his way on issue after issue, politics, policies after policies. Now, we'll come to why. But, I mean, do you agree with my analysis, first of all? No doubt about it.

If you look at it, when Trump comes in, he has an extraordinary mandate from a broad cross-a section of America that could be a permanent political realignment and form a governing coalition at the federal state and local level for a generation or two to come. The working class industrial Midwestern voter had fully embraced him. The anti-war Midwestern voter in place like Wisconsin and Minnesota

and Iowa and other locations had fully embraced him. The new MAGA voter, Hispanic, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Venezuela, Latin American had embraced him at an extraordinary level. And a lot of working class African-American men and Asian voters had joined him, Indian voters, other Chinese voters, Korean voters,

were flipping for the Democratic Party en masse to Trump. Trump was running in some places, in terms of margin 40 to 50 points ahead of traditional Republicans. So that's the coalition that elected them. And what they wanted, particularly young MAGA, old MAGA wanted, OG MAGA wanted to no more stupid foreign adventurism, no more meddling and entanglements overseas. a refocus on American domestic issues, taking on corrupt big institutions, whether that's big ag or big pharma or big tech or big media, and restoring sort of traditional cultural values,

none of all the sort of trans-identarian kind of insanity that had been unleashed in their schools and in their, and in the culture, and restoring their jobs and wages. And then for new MAGA, a lot of them wanted to burn it all down. A lot of these Zoomers, and younger millennials

are just asking supporting whoever it is is going to give them a torch so they can go burn something down. And when Trump gets in, seem to represent and reflect that. There were people within the cabinet that represented that,

Vice President Vance, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. And then there are other people that were institutionally inclined or potentially aligned

such as Undersecretary of Defense Eldridge Colby whose grandfather was the guy who outed the family jewels at the CIA and for it got permanently blacklisted. By the way, he got blacklisted. His grandfather got blacklisted by the names of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poppy Bush. You might say the grandkid hasn't forgot. So there was all this potential of these people who were going to institutionalize these reforms and remedies,

legislate these reforms and remedies, execute them. And we saw a ceasefire declared in Gaza. We saw the effort of Tulsi Gabbard, as the director of national intelligence, puts out a report that says the Russian military is strong, not weak, and that Ukraine basically can't win the conflict. A report that says Venezuela is not a narco-trafficking hub of any significance that says Iran is not developing nuclear weapons in any time super soon. And in fact, we saw the effort, we saw some negotiations with Venezuela to get certain people released and other things like that. We also saw the order that there be no more weapons sent to Ukraine and no long range attacks on Ukraine. All that's in March. And in April, he announces his trade policy of trying to restore and re-onsure domestic U.S. manufacturing.

the official campaign of the administration is we don't care about Wall Street. We only care about Main Street so the markets can do whatever they want, that we don't care. And then all of a sudden, May and early June, we get a complete reversal. And it starts with, in building up to it, there was all this promise the Epstein files are going to be disclosed, this infamous individual who sits, who's kind of a filter for whether or not America can come to terms with the corruption of its deep state, its national security apparatus, a man who is not only involved in all kinds of grotesque personal criminal behavior and abusing underage girls, but was involved and connected to high profile Israeli public

officials, connected to high profile American deep state officials, the connected to Robert Maxwell. You know, you can go back and watch our episodes here with the Duran on Epstein. but to many people, though, is if we're going to come to terms with justice, we're going to out Epstein. And there's promises Epstein files are on the Attorney General's desk. So the first three months, and only that during this time, we get Doge. We get, which is started because of a literal meme. You know, it was a meme coin.

And somebody came up with the idea to tell Elon, why don't we call the Department of Government Efficiency, take the Doge coin and make it an actual agency? And only Elon Musk could make a meme into a government reality. And what are they doing? They're getting rid of U.S.Aid. Talking about getting rid of a national endowment for democracy, all these regime change operations disguised as media and foreign aid. And he's about in April and May,

Musk is talking about let's use Doge at the Federal Reserve. Let's use Doge to audit the Fed. Let's use Doge to look at the CIA's black box files. Let's, you know, their unofficial funding and spending activities. Let's look at the defense department and the Pentagon. Billy Long has put in his IRS commissioner. And he's my favorite kind of IRS commissioner because he says the IRS shouldn't exist. The infernal revenue service.

And some folks in these Tennessee still call it from the days of the revenues coming after the moonshiders. So it looks promising. Trump is at peak approval with new MAGA and old MAGA alike. There's excitement. There's enthusiasm. There's hope. There's optimism. The immigration is being very impactful.

All of a sudden, the border is effectively sealed. Two million people leave the country that were here illegally. All of a sudden, you see growth for native-born jobs, growth in real wages. Energy costs are coming down because we're de-escalating conflict with Iran, de-escalating conflict with Russia. So geopolitical risk, de-escalating conflict at that time with Venezuela. and that's helping bring of prices the rate of rise in prices down and then it all flips and it all starts with Epstein all of a sudden the Epstein files can't be disclosed all of a sudden Epstein killed himself all of a sudden there's nothing to see here and the in a total complete reversal and that starts a cascading domino effect where all of a sudden we go back on what we're going to do with Russia and we start talking about sanctions and we start

talking about effective embargoes. We start talking about there has to be an immediate ceasefire on the current lines. All of a sudden, we say we got to go into Iran. We got to support war and conflict with Iran. Suddenly, they magically and miraculously develop nuclear weapons overnight. Suddenly, Venezuela is some imminent threat. And we start talking about sending military assets off the coast of it as well. All of a sudden becomes an obsession with foreign policy. All of a sudden, the trade policy quits being an industrial policy and starts being. in domestic and global sanctions policy. I don't like the ad you ran, 10% tariffs.

I don't like you helping Russia, 50% tariffs. I don't like you being an insufficient supporter of Ukraine, 50% tariffs. I'm going to threaten 100% tariffs, maybe 500% tariffs. I'm agitated how you're handling Bolsonaro, 50% tariffs. Just willy-nilly all over the place. And what you're seeing domestically at the same time is an economy that's weakening a foundation that was already fractured. And basically the Trump administration turns into an entire donor-captured, donor-driven

institution that almost every decision is filtered through that. Also at this point, dear Scotty Besson, Soros Scottie, as I like to call him, for those that don't know, our Secretary of Treasury, has very little history in MAGA. He's got a long, long, long history with George Soros. George Soros made him fantastically and fabulously rich. he starts hijacking more and more of our policy. You'll see this in various Treasury Department statements. Why is he involved in diplomacy at all?

But taking snide comments at the Russian economics advisor who was here trying to help negotiate peace in the U.S. And Bessett would go on and call him nothing more than a cheap Russian propagandist. He'll attack, and he just attacks people all over the place. Tax attorneys, negotiators, it doesn't matter. You get a sense of who he is. aside from being a corrupt, rogue Wall Street actor. And then the guy literally has his nose up in the air all the time. Like, you'll see photos of people and it's like this.

I mean, he's literally a snooty fruity Wall Streeter. And the, in more ways than one. So he starts hijacking a lot of our domestic and foreign policy. And all of a sudden, Trump, who said, screw Wall Street, we're here for Main Street. For the next three, you know, last two months, all he talks about is, look at the stock market. Look at Wall Street. Look at the stock market. Look at Wall Street.

And so that goes off the rails. The possibility of negotiations with Russia where Trump agrees to basically Instant Bowl Plus and the first step along that way is that Ukraine would draw from the Don Bass and then Russia will have a ceasefire on the other lines while they negotiate the full Instant Bowl Plus deals. Trump proposed this. Trump pitched it. Trump promised it. And then Trump is the one that walks away from it.

And rather than admit and acknowledge this, he attacks Russia and the Russians, you know, just randomly on a random day. Keep, you know, the goddess involved in the, for a while was putting no pressure on Israel to pull back in Gaza while they raise Gaza to the ground. And while they're involved in Lebanon and involved in Syria and involved in, I mean, we just, the first Syrian present ever visit the White House is a man who is one of the most famous ISIS terrorist in the history of the world. The man that President Trump said, he was going to. going to bomb to hell. He's now given such tours at the Oval Office. So the, and then supposedly now we're going to go to Nigeria too while we're at it. Then all of a sudden there's talk of

escalation with Venezuela, escalation with everywhere else. The escalation with Russia. Let's send in long-range missiles. Let's see what happens. Ha, ha, ha. That kind of inanity and insanity. Where we're going to start testing our nuclear weapons because everybody else is, even though nobody else is. This just kind of craziness, it starts

with the Epstein file, complete. 180 reversal. And to me, it was when I started watching it, I needed a useful filter to explain Germany and France and the UK and the EU leaders in Canada and the US and Israel, all combined.

And I started realizing it reminded me of my mentor from Yale. So when I was at Yale, left the protest because they were trying to screw poor kids over, a man who benefited by that from that decision that led Yale to actually reinstate its full scholarship programs for low-income students. was a young law student from Ohio, known J.D. Van. But when I was there, Paul Kennedy was my mentor.

He had just written the rise and fall of the great powers. And he talked about one of the telltale indicators of a dying empire is hubris, that the Greeks really originated and wrote about so well. This sin that seems fatal. You can just YouTube it if you want. And you find 100 different examples. of people talking about how this leader, this civilization, this regime, this empire, collapsed more internally from hubris.

Hubris was the great sin to be wary of. And like, here's some of the clinical definition of it. Excessive confidence, misjudged one's own power, loss of contact with reality, contempt for others, recklessness in ignoring risks or downsides, and inability to accept advice or criticism. The signs are, happened for at least three months or longer. It happens after someone has extraordinary success

or comes into power or extraordinary power. They become increasingly impulsive and dissocial from social circles they were previously part of. They show extreme grandiosity, self-centered focused, and they show increasing condescension towards critics and others. They have an inability to be rational and you will see extreme irrational. from this behavior. Kennedy said you can see the signs of it with a dying empire, an imperial overreach, institutional corruption, rising debt, domestic conflict, and declining production of real things, real resources, real industry. He says, you'll see the leaders will ignore history, embrace ideology, won't recognize limits,

and will pursue foreign adventurism that is not even in their realistic geopolitical interests. Is there anything that better describes the leaders of Europe, the leaders of the United States, the leaders of Israel, than hubris? Nothing at all. Can I just say, Rob, before we proceed, I've discovered two things about you of our previous programs. One is that you're related to John Quincy Adams, one of the great presidents of the United States. The other is that you were mentored by Paul Kennedy, who I consider to be, and I know many people considered to be the greatest historian of international relations of the last 50 years and the successor

of AJP Taylor, whom I also briefly, briefly knew, just to say. So I massively impressed that you knew Paul Kennedy in that way. And can I just say, I think you're absolutely, absolutely spot on right. One thing I would add to this story of overreach and decline as somebody who has worked in government is that one of the other features of decline is incredible degrees of intrigue and bureaucratic in fighting, which become ultimately more important for the political class than almost anything else. And I can't help but think that one of the reasons we've seen

this extraordinary change that you've so well described in the administration is that there has been some kind of bureaucratic struggle which the wrong people have won. Now, why did they win? You've mentioned donors.

Can I ask a question about one individual who constantly comes up? The Russian media talk about her all the time. And that is Susan Wiles. Can you tell us a little bit about whether

she's played any role in this and whether she's perhaps being the person who, as I know the Russians thing, has tilted things in a certain direction. There's some of us warned from the get-go about the risk of a person I

call swampy Susie. So she goes bad, I mean, look at her hairdo. You think she's still in the 1950s. I mean, the So this is somebody who came to political power through her husband in the 80s as part of the Reagan Revolution, but was not an ideologue of part of the Reagan Revolution, was part of the corporatist side of the Reagan Revolution that people like populist critics like Kevin Phillips called a betrayal of what he called, you know, old school fur coat, not meat coat, conservatism. And so she came to power during that phrase and then stated it and became a career lobbyist. And so she is sort of the person who knows all the corporate donors and the corporate controllers of the institutional party interest. She snookered her way into the Trump administration through the Trump campaign by being a Floridian who was going to help Trump against DeSantis, his then challenger in the 2024 primaries.

And she played her cards well. And the other things she did well during that stage is she knew her great threat, someone who could be. a chief of staff who would be a populist O.G. MAGA version of the, who would actually be voter focused and voter-centric and voter-driven was Paul Dan's. Paul Dan has been chief of staff, the Office of Personnel and Management. He was part of putting together Heritage's Project 2025, where his part of Project 2025 was how to dismantle the bureaucratic administrative state writ large. through every, and that would include the deep state aspect of that in the Pentagon, in the state

department, in the procurement division of the Pentagon, especially, in the, which is the heart and center of the military industrial complex. The CIA, the NSA, the surveillance state, take a, he was an ally of Robert Kennedy, an ally of Tulsi Gabbard, an ally of J.D. Vance, an ally of Eldridge Colby. And these were the reformers. The rest, But she went out of her way during late stage campaign to use the misrepresentations of Project 25 to blacklist Paul Danz. And she knew the moment she got him out that that meant she had solidified her own position. She bragged and leaked. You can find political articles from article from April of 2024.

Another time where she says she is going to be the gatekeeper to Trump. Trump was okay to do all of this because it's become increasingly apparent. that Trump thinks his mistakes of personnel in his first term were they weren't sufficiently personally loyal to him. Not that they weren't sufficiently loyal to MAGA, but they weren't sufficiently loyal to him. And that's why in the second go-around, he's picked people he thinks they're going to be personally loyal.

But it's almost like, and this has been true of American presidents really for a century now at some level. You get into the White House and you think of yourself, not as the president and the commander-in-chief, but it's simply one person at a power table and that you're there to represent, at least in theory, the voters, but that the Secretary of Treasury, for example, is going to be, who does Wall Street pick?

It seems like our presidents don't pick the Secretary of Treasury. Wall Street picks the Secretary of Treasury. And you're like, okay, you're going to represent the Wall Street interest. And then either the State Department or Defense Department, you're going to represent the National Security Establishment. And then, hey, Pentagon, you're going to represent the military industrial industrial complex. And it's almost like they think they're negotiating with them, that they see them as equal power brokers around the table. And you can find complaints, by the way, all the

way back to 1913 with who Woodrow Wilson picked for his secretary of the Treasury. And so the, you know, the days of William Jennings Bryan being Secretary of States and resigning in protest of war has ended with him. And that's clearly what Trump has done. And the court of that, is Susie Wiles. She is the corporate gatekeeper. So when Steve Bannon was there in 2017, he had this big list of promises to the voters that Trump had made. And each day was monitoring, have we done this? Have we done this? Have we done this? Swampy Susie is just the opposite. She has a list of who the corporate donors are. Have we delivered for this corporate contributor? Have we limited for this corporate donor? I mean, we did our

economic show in the summer. I said, expect and anticipate Trump to become don't. owner driven for the next several months and ignore voters. And unfortunately, he did even worse at scale than I imagine. But I think he's as infected with hubris as the rest of our deep state and empire would be empire builders who are in the dying throws of a dying empire. But the Russians were absolutely correct that she has way too much power and influence. And that for Rahim Qasam, you know, from the UK, covers politics. politics in the U.S. He said, where my MAGA policy ideas go to die is Susie Wiles. She blocks it,

blocks it, blocks it. She has been sabotaging Gabbard at the Director of National Intelligence, sabotaging Robert Kennedy at Health and Human Services. Brett Weinstein just recently, not saying anything out of school, Weinstein confirmed it for the world on Rogan yesterday the day before when he had talked to all the leading Maha officials and said they can't get anything done. What he didn't identify as the source internally at Susie Wiles. She cares about big pharma contributors. She cares about big insurance contributors. She cares about big corporate contributors.

And you're seeing her rub off on Trump, even in his recent embarrassing demonstrations, trying to gaslight to everybody that the economy is great, coming up with some of the dumbest policy proposals known to man. Let's have a 50-year mortgage. Let's be, okay, so I guess we're going to implement the World Economic Foundation. I'll own nothing and be happy about it. The 15-year car loans was being floated around. First people thought it was a meme and a joke.

And then it turned out, no, that was actually being considered as a policy proposal. How can we get more money to those poor banks? So it's been a Swampy Susie is a key critical contributor. The bad faith actors, the saboteurs of MAGA are Swampy Susie, Soros Scotty Bessett, who's been underappreciated as a major problem. He's the one pushing the nonsense about the Russian economy. He's the one pushing sanction, sanction, sanction, sanction,

he's the one saying misuse your tariff power to do it for these other reasons, as we'll get to. He came out after the Supreme Court argument and said Trump was going to win. This is the kind of delusional lies and gaslighting he does on a daily basis to the president.

Because anybody who listen to that that knows anything about law knows that the chances of Trump's tariffs getting affirmed and upheld on their prior grounds is somewhere between nil and zil. Nuka and zonka. Zero for those that may not recognize the language. So the

and they're just lying about it. And then you got narco, Marco Rubio. People forget, you know, why they called him the cocaine Marco back in the day. How does this sort of blue-collar Cuban get all of a sudden, you know, get into law school and get all the prestige of it and get into politics and power? Where did the money come from?

The, you know, the, well, it's because Marco Rubio's sister married into the cocaine cowboys, the same cocaine cowboys that there's three documentaries on. It wasn't Venezuela's running all that cocaine through Miami Vice Days of 1980s. It was Narco Marco's brother-in-law doing it. And so he is basically hijacked almost all of our foreign policy. In fact, it was only when he was removed from the negotiations that we even got any kind of ceasefire in Gaza. So yes, the Russian were right, Swampy Susie is a key source of power within the White House, and it's not a good one. Let's talk about tariffs, because for me, that was the big signature economic policy of this

administration. And my own view, when it started, was that always this was going to be a difficult legal argument, but I thought that if you had a proper economic case for tariffs, if it was presented as an economic policy, not just a tax policy, but an economic policy addressing the deficit issues, talking about the industrial situation of the United States, the overall economic situation in the United States. I think there might just have been a chance, especially with this court, that he might have won. that it seems to me well i mean i'm not an expert on the law here but it seems to me that if there was ever that argument has been completely thrown to pieces because the tariffs have been used in exactly the way that you said as an instrument of economic coercion of countries around the world and very

little to do any longer with the underlying economic case for tariffs which i by the way happened to believe is an extremely strong one for the United States. Now, what the media here in London are saying is that the oral argument in the Supreme Court went badly, that the Supreme Court looks like it's more likely than not going to decide against the president on this issue. Firstly, do you think that is right? And if this falls apart, what's left? What is left of using economic policy then? Because I've seen that they could attach the tariffs to other things, but these are bits and bobs of laws.

They don't seem to me to provide the kind of solidity that a true tariff policy, a long-term tariff policy needs. Anyway, what are your thoughts about this, Robert? It's extraordinary because I have been a long supporter of tariff policy, the Hamiltonian American industry development policy. Eldridge Colby, for example, strongly supports it for different reasons. His argument is that we don't have the industrial base to support a strong military presence or to win a major war. And if you're serious about national security, you need to re-onsure domestic industry. And we see that in live time as Russia can scale up very quickly and rapidly.

China can scale up very quickly and very rapidly in military development. And the U.S. is still way behind. It's like, well, we'll get to those patriots in about seven years, you know, that kind of thing. So now part of that's the procurement process. We should probably nationalize the military to remove the military industrial complex from ever being a threat in the future. but as was a contaminating political element, but also we see with Russia,

when you connect, you know, I agree we did the interview with Mr. Slavicman. You can follow on YouTube. You guys have had him on a couple of times. Great guy, very unique personal and professional history. But he's talked about how it's when he's a big free market guy, but he goes not in the military. You need that to be state controlled because if it's not,

it goes haywire because he saw how bad it was when he himself was in the U.S. military. in the procurement process and now it corrupts. So that, you know, all aspects of that, it had been a problem. And to the question, you know, Soros-Scotti, just follow whatever Soros' obsession is, and you can predict where Soros-Scotti is going to be, where Besant is going to be. So the Besant is anti-China, Bessent is anti-Russia. But Besset completely, you know, completely misnegotiated that whole thing.

But one of the other things he completely misdid was he gave the wrong predicate to Trump for the tariffs. legally. He then encouraged incentivize Trump to follow the pattern of hubris, the, the Icarus path, if you will, into using it willy-nilly. Isn't this a wonderful power? I'll just tear a few, tear few, tear few, that kind of thing for any, in every other reason. And then third, he went back and lied to the president about the oral argument. Said, oh, you're going to win, you're going to win, Mr. President to keep him delusional in following Soros Gotti down that Primrose path to peril. So the legal basis that Trump used. So in the U.S. tariffs are considered duties or impost.

Duties and imposts are assigned Article I power given exclusively to the legislative branch. The Supreme Court has previously stated that Congress can delegate to some degree that Article I power to the president when it impacts issues of foreign policy and his role as commander-in-chief. And so that's where they they afforded some degree of leeway. How much leeway was never fully clear. And Trump was testing the limits of it already in the policy he did. But Bessett pushed it even further by saying let's use the not the four different specific laws that provide for very specific kinds of tariffs. That you have to do a certain investigation, make a certain factual finding, then issue the tariff. They cap the rate of that tariff.

It cap the duration of that And it can't be used Just solely for revenue gathering purposes Instead, he used Just the broad international emergency law Which doesn't have the word duties Or impost or tariffs anywhere in there It talks about the ability to shut down trade

The ability to embargo trade The ability to license trade And so Trump's administration's legal position was Well, if we could ban all trade Why can't we tariff it? If we can't we tariff it? license all trade, why can't we tariff it? That might have had a plausible argument despite the fact that some conservative jurists were going to have a problem like Gorsuch despises the abuse of

emergency power during COVID. So when he sees president say, I have a new emergency power, he immediately grows skeptical. So you put in the three liberals who just hate Trump and they will rule against him no matter what the issue is for the most part. With Gorsuch, that meant he had to keep everybody else on board, had to keep Alito, Thomas, the two other constitutional conservatives, as I call them, and then the institutionalist, the corporatist, the corporatist, which are Roberts, Barrett, and Cavana. What's fascinating is, it turns out he could have got Barrett Roberts and Cabin

on side by the nature of their questions. But where they went was, they're like, how is this, given how Trump has been using tariffs, so like you're saying you had the power to do these tariffs in April. But look at what he's done since then. And I said from day one, if you abuse tariff power in this way, now if you undermine its economic purpose, you destroy its legal basis. And they basically said, look, this is where they're going to go is they're going to say this is a major question. And any major question, Congress can't delegate.

Congress has to determine it in the first instance. They may say it's outside of Congress's constitutional power to delegate at all. They may reverse that old precedent because they've seen how crazy. Trump got with it. And so consequently, I think the chances of them winning are very low. The only thing they may do is they may stay the effect of the order to allow Congress to take remedial action because they don't want to order the president to write a trillion dollars in checks back to a bunch of people.

Now, that process is very protracted here in America. And it's like the tax refund. You have to get three years of litigation before you get money back. but that would be a different level disaster for Trump, a budgetary disaster for Trump. That's why he's thinking about sending stimmy checks, a $2,000 checks to everybody. He wants to get that money out before he doesn't have it anymore

as ways to say, see, my terror policy is wonderful. He should be focused on doing things as a way to help ordinary people that are struggling, but unfortunately that's not the priority. So he blew it, and I blame Stephen Miller, who is good on immigration from a MAGA perspective.

He's absolutely horrible on most foreign policy. You can go back. He said some of the most nasty, vile things about Palestinians. He's a huge Israeli hawk. His wife went that shit insane recently on Pierce Morgan. And he gave him advice that has turned out to be terrible advice, too, about the legal basis of this. If they had told Trump, you need to stay within these lines

and use the right statutes, he would have just got his tariff policy affirmed. Instead, the Supreme Court may go so far as to take away most of his tariff power completely because of how he overreached. He needed to focus overwhelmingly on this issue. Tariffs could have defined his presidency. I think that there is, my sense of my distance is that there is a major coalition that can be built in the United States,

tariff policy. I get the sense that it isn't just working class Americans in old coal and steel towns who are interested in tariffs. I think it goes much, much wider than that. And tariffs in so many ways, protectionism is the natural economic policy of the United States. It was how the United States was built up in the 19th and early 20th century. It is not what caused the Great Depression, by the way, I know this is always trotted out, but it simply isn't true. That is absolutely wrong history. And again, I'm not going to discuss it here, but I can say that conclusively. And it would have been the policy that would have represented, it would have represented if it had been followed through not just a change in the entire economic environment in the United States, but it would have represented a return to republicanism and away from empire. The kind of open economic policy that the United States has adopted post the Second World

War is a British policy, which, of course, the British developed as part of their empire, in the 19th century, a fact that is not very well understood by far too many people. So I think if it had been argued properly and intelligently, I suspect he would have won his case actually because I suspect that even in a court, especially a Supreme Court of the United States, anchored in the Constitution,

that argument would have been compelling. And of course, one of the, advocates of protectionism. Well, it goes all the way back to Hamilton, who was there writing the Federalist papers and all of those things. So it would have probably won in the Supreme Court. And you could have also built a big electoral constituency around it. And then perhaps in time, maybe not immediately, but in a few years, you might even have got Congress to legislate on to. So I think this has been a catastrophic missed opportunity. It was completely mishandled, almost from the beginning, casually, recklessly. It wasn't something that the president himself

really seemed to understand his own policy terribly well. And he was talking all the time about, was it McKinley back in the late 19th century, McKinley, who was by the way, an extremely capable president would have been horrified by the way it was all done anyway that's my own thought I think if this fails

it will define the presidency this entire presidency and it will be left to someone else perhaps sometime in the future because I expect this policy will come back

it'll be left to somebody else to pick up the to pick up you know the challenge but over the next three years, that opportunity will be lost. That's my own thought. And I think that if it happens, it's going to hugely erode away the further support there is in the country as well. Just quickly, very quickly, tariff policy, economic policy, foreign policy, deeply interconnected with each other.

If you're spending all your time thinking about foreign policy, you're not going to find any time for tariffs. So let's look at that. Why is he spending so much time on foreign policy? I mean, surely that is not what he was elected to do. He was elected to do the reverse. All the time now, he's talking about foreign policy. That seems to be his interest. Is this because that's what the donors want?

I think so, and I think it's also this hubris, this need to show off, this neat, like, you start to see the sins of hubris and you're seeing it shown in Trump's deviations from MAGA. Like yesterday, he was asked in the White House, Marjorie Taylor Green says, why don't you refocus on the domestic agenda? Vice President Vance publicly said that that's what they were going to do the day after the elections last week. And Trump, first he's dismissive of Marjorie Taylor Green. showing his continued contempt for any kind of critic or anything that could be even perceived as criticism. And then he starts talking about he's the president of the world. He's like, well, what the heck? He goes, I'm president for the world.

I got to take care of the world. Well, no, nobody liked you president of the world. In fact, I told you America first meant America here, not over there. And so it's a level of self-delusion. I mean, you can see it in the, and it's what happens to me of somebody like Swampy Susie scheduling his calendar. I mean, who came up with the idea? Right on the eve of these elections, why don't we spend a whole tour of the world?

Go to Asia, go to here, go to there, talk about going into Venezuela, talking about going into Nigeria. All that insanity. It's because that's her mindset. And it's a version of him of MAGA that's not what the voters voted for, but it's like 1950s America.

Well, we're the dominant unit power. I mean, the Soviet Union was growing, but we had a head of nuclear weapons all the rest. we were the sort of peak of global power. There's a part of Trump that gets entranced by that. It's not what he was voted for, but he clearly gets dragged into it. The second part is he's completely deferred

most of the key policy decisions in his administration through Wiles to Narco, Marco, and Soros Scottie. And then you have the people who are the generals of the Pentagon. These people are all nuts. They're like the people that were in the, you know, the great film by Stanley Cooper, which is really a documentary about the risk of nuclear war. And Dr. Strangelove, and you have the same dynamic with these people now. They tell him the most ridiculous things.

So Bessett feeds him constant nonsense about the China trade negotiation position and the Russian economy. So he told the Russian economy is about the fracture. It's all weak. They got lines up. That's where Trump gets all that. All that comes right from Soreau Scottie. It's all garbage, but that's the source of it.

Same with China. Soreau Scottie convinced him. Now, I think there are serious internal issues with China. I mean, the real estate issues, the youth unemployment issues, so on and so forth. But he convinced him that China was never going to use its rare earth as a Trump card. And it's like, I mean, Dumberg, a little green chicken, that's how he appears as in the avatar. was telling the world for a year, China has escalatory dominance. They can just say no raw earth and everybody else of the world is going to have to capitulate.

So you can't win a trade war right now with China. That's where like some people are worried about a kinetic conflict with China. We can't even get engaging in a trade war with China. What kinetic conflict are we going to get into? So because they, for 30, 40 years, we're willing to risk some of the environmental and other damage that comes with true rare earth development. refinement and production. And now they, and they used it. And they used it in Trump.

That was a capitulation tour in Asia. That wasn't a victory tour. I mean, I mean, I got to give the Chinese credit. They made Trump sit there and wait for Xi. Trump's like, look at that, looking at. He's trying, hey, Xi, please like me. It wasn't working at all because Besson completely mishandled it. He took pot shots at the Chinese lead negotiator, claimed he had been fired,

because of how great Soros Scottie is. And then that guy's right back. In fact, he got promoted. He's just all garbage. He was pitching for CNBC because Trump watches that garbage, unfortunately. So we got rolled. There will be no continued trade war with China. That's done for the rest of Trump's term.

The Soroscotti's out there telling people, we're going to have rare earths in a year or two. We're going to have refined, produced, rare earths in a year or two. Nobody's been able to do it in less than 10 years. This is utter garbage that he's lying to the president about, whether he wants to get back. at China for that lost Hong Kong dollar trade of George Soros or whatever it may be. He is delusional.

And remember, who was it that shut down and drove Elon Musk out of the White House? Who neutered Doge before it could go to the Federal Reserve, neutered Doge before it could go to the audit the Fort Knox. Soros Gotti. In fact, he literally got into fisticuffs with Elon Musk in the White House. So this guy is such a saboteur of the Trump administration and of Maga. But Trump just defers to him. And Steve Bannon, who's, God bless him, but he's a complete sucker for bad personnel to choices.

He thought Robert Mueller was a good guy. And that's, I mean, he's brilliant architect of populism. Terrible personnel judge. Soros Scottie got paid. He was a long time with Soros. He leaves right after Trump gets in, first time. And supposedly this was because he was secretly pro-Trump. Why did George Soros, why was he the principal,

financier and backer of his of sorrows of scottie's uh hedge fund was george sorrows was george soros giving billions of dollars to scotty beset because he thought he was going to be anti trump or pro trump because he thought he was pro maga don't think so no so under that irs reforms dead why billy long gets removed who removes him sorrows scottie so the that's a key part is that trump is given bad intel and bad information he's constantly being told he can have an easy win hey Russia's about the I mean I had this debate with high-ranking members of the administration who were trying to convince me

that Russia was in a stalemate and couldn't move forward on the front lines in Ukraine they're like oh they can take out the infrastructure but they're not going to move at all and I'm like this is a battle of it and so I some of these people started paying attention when you know I kept pricking some of them so the saying look you could go to an autist on telegram

and find out more about Ukraine than the Pentagon than the vice president than the president. It's because it's true. That's reality. Some of them were agitated. Like, well, you know, how, why are you saying that? Because it's true. Because it's a sad, pitiful truth. But they actually believe this nonsense. Some people have been wondering, do they really believe it? You know, Lieutenant Colonel Davis has had similar confirmation from his own source. Yes, they do. They were convinced at various junctures that Russia couldn't win, that Russia's economy was bleeding out, that China was. weak and would have to fold and capitulate on the trade war and would never use rare earth as a

as a true trump card that iran would fold and capitulate if we just bombed them once or twice and that regime change would be easy these same people have been telling him regime change in venezuela will be easy they just threaten him and he'll probably run away and if he doesn't run away we can just take a decapitation strike and the Venezuelan people can't wait for uh uh the machado Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winner. A little cue for future betting on Nobel Peace Prize. Pick the regime change candidate. That's so they'll give the Peace Prize.

We're the Belarusian leader and all this is one joke after another. I mean, the Nobel Prize was always a joke, but it's even a bigger joke these days. And that she'll come in and the Venezuelan people will build golden statues to Trump and we'll get access to all their rare earths and all the oil and all the gas and it'll all be wonderful. And there won't be, instead we have the Colombian president saying, why don't we create a grand columbia why don't we create a mini bricks in latin america why don't we unite columbia brazil and uh venezuela with ecuador and create a powerful geopolitical alliance that can push back on the imperial yankee that trump is trying to create you know give tulsie gabbert credit

she's out there saying we don't do regime change we don't do regime change it hit mr president don't do regime change uh but she's staking her personal credibility on that but it's because why the foreign focus because they're telling him he's going to be a big winner he's going to be the ultimate it's the sign of ultimate hubris that the lack of recognition of the limits of one's own power like he constantly misjudges his own leverage thinks he has leverage against russia when he doesn't thinks he has leverage against iran when he doesn't think he has leverage against china when he doesn't instead he does have leverage over israel but only sporadically erratically uses it he does have leverage over ukraine but he led zalinski zalinski of all people dog walk him

that meeting was supposed to, the second one, it was supposed to happen in August. But in October, he was there and told people he was going to get Zelensky to sign on to Insta Bowl Plus. And at a minimum, the ceasefire deal, removal, Ukraine withdraws from the Don Bass, freeze the conflict elsewhere. And Zelensky just said no.

And Trump did nothing about it. Instead, he walks it back and takes Zelensky's position. I mean, what's it like to be dogwalked by this little midget from Ukraine? This corrupt, the guy who's energy commissioners, I mean, I'll give him credit. You know, I always say never in writing, always in cash. But I guess the Ukrainians take that seriously. You know, they got these huge stockpiles of money sent from the Federal Reserve. It never even goes to the bank.

They just stockpile it in their little cabinets and closets and the rest. And he's the energy guy got disclosed with that. How embarrassing. This guy is harassing Christians on a regular basis. Locking up priests, old priests, are being locked up in Ukraine. by this 10-cup dictator. And that's who we're willing to jack up U.S. energy prices by sanctioning Russia for? That's who we're willing to risk nuclear conflict for?

And what happens is whenever he, Trump was also told that Russia didn't have these weapons, that this was made up, that Russia was faking. There was no Poseidon. There was no nuclear-powered, you know, tsunami-inducing mini-submarine. There was definitely no missile that could be nuclear power that could travel around the world and could just bomb us whenever they wanted. No, that didn't exist. That's all fake, addressing propaganda. And then Trump gets to see it on live TV.

And so he, of course, God bless him. He's got no poker face. I mean, he just goes to the truth. You know, it was like when the Iran war was going sideways. I mean, you could tell how much the warnings that we had given he started to see happen in live time because the State Department told him that China would oppose Iran. shutting down the straits of our moves, that Russia would not entertain any support of Iran. And then he sees just the opposite. And then the decapitation strike would work with ease like that's ever worked with ease.

And then he saw just the opposite and you saw him panic, truthy, all day long. So you see him so, well, we're going to test our own nuclear weapons now. Why? Because he sees these nuclear-powered weapons that can be nuclear weapons also developed by the Russians in ways that we can't match. currently. Russia is ahead. That's why he keeps pretending we have more nuclear missiles. I mean, he's been told we have more nuclear missiles. It's like this has been confirmed by every source known to man. Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do, more nukes than we do. But he has convinced himself of this. High-ranking members of the administration believed all this nonsense

about the Ukrainian conflict, and it's just a filter. And part of why the Israel lobby. So, you know, I've defended Israel publicly in a wide range of settings. A whole bunch of young MAGIS is off the Israel train entirely. And the reason is the Israel lobby's hubris. It's arrogance at trying at what it did with the war in Iran, at bombing everything. I mean, you can bet go on polymarket and bet on which country Israel is going to bomb on. And just, just that, yes, because it cashes in. Are they going to bomb this country, that country, another country, this country, you name it.

All the disaster of how the, we said from the get-go, if you go, if you go, go into Gaza and raise Gaza, you will lose the court of public opinion. Just as a matter of tactics, it's bad strategy. They didn't care because Israel is infected with this hubris. And in the U.S., they're trying to currently blacklist Tucker Carlson, just because he interviews Nick Flintes. I mean, it's just insane. The real reason is because he is skeptical of staying on the Israel train.

You know, I would have said two years ago that being anti-Israel was a death nail to getting any kind of political power. Now it's just the opposite. Israel is becoming a political pariah in the United States. It's part of what the New York City election was about. Mammie is the reason why Wilders sunk in the Netherlands. He was so obsessively pro-Israel. He lost votes to an EU young party amongst working class urban youth, who even though they don't probably agree with a lot of the other politics of that party, that party was the big pro-Palestine party. And here you have in most Jewish city in America. They just elected a Muslim mayor who ran on,

if Bibi Netanyahu steps foot in this city, I'm going to arrest him and send him to the hay, who has a 17-point plan to divest from Israel. That's because Israel is a political pariah in the United States because of the hubris of Israel's policies and the hubris of Israel's lobby. Here's how it's impacted this. five of the six top people that were working for Hegson, that were reformers,

who would have given correct intel to the president about the Ukrainian conflict and other issues, were removed by the Israel lobby. They went through and tried to find any time they'd said anything skeptical of Israel and got him removed. The chief of staff to the joint chiefs of staff, same thing, got removed based on it saying anything questioning of Israel. Same thing has happened at the DNI, same thing has happened in the CIA, same thing has happened the State Department. The Israel lobby is completely corrupting and contaminating the Trump administration's policies. And part of that is leading to bad intel and bad information, which leads to bad decisions. Very bad decisions. And I mean, without perhaps goating into too much detail, we are now seeing

this situation play out in Ukraine because this story that began to spread in the summer that the war was in still make was, I mean, to anybody who was paying attention to what was really happening, it was completely bizarre. And surely now the president is starting to understand that the people who have been giving him this advice have been, at best wrong and perhaps lying to him. I mean, you know, that's perhaps taking it further. That might be an even more plausible than. let's say worst interpretation.

Now, what's he going to do? I mean, one thing that he perhaps needs to do, and I'm going to say this again as an old bureaucratic warrior, you have Marco Rubio, and he's occupying the two top spots at the same time. He's both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. The reason why there was a National Security Advisor created in the first place, was so that the president could have an alternative person to turn to for advice.

Having a situation where one person occupies the same positions is extremely dangerous and wrong. The only time it's happened before is when Henry Kissinger did the two things at the same time, and he was basically in charge of US foreign policy then. Doing it again puts Rubio in charge. of US foreign policy now because he controls all the information. That's basically what he does. He controls the information flow. And if you worked in a bureaucracy, you know that information is power.

Inflammation, which is turning out wrong. Now, perhaps it's too much to expect that he can sack Ruthie. I'd love to see it happen, but perhaps it's too much to ask. But he can at least appoint a, a. national security advisor. Why doesn't he? Precisely. And it's because the same reason

Billy Long got removed from the IRS, same reason Elon Musk got ran out of the White House, is that Narco Marco and Soros Scotty go to great lengths to cut off independent information. For example, they use the Iran war to isolate Tulsi Gabbard because the implicit promise in the campaign

was that Tulsi Gabbard would Deep Six the Deep State by controlling the intelligence infrastructure. And why hasn't that happened? It hasn't happened because John Ratcliffe is just laundering intel from foreign agencies. So on Ukraine, he just launders what Ukraine and MI6 especially tell him. And he says that's our intelligence. On anything Mid-East, he launders Mossad intelligence and pretends it's our CIA intelligence. And so if Gabbard ever pushing him.

his back like she did on Iran, for example. She gets isolated and marginalized and blacklisted. And instead, Trump worries about what, as he himself publicly talked about when he went to Israel, whatever Miriam Adelson, someone born in Israel, not a native born American at all, what she thinks. And in exchange, he's going to spend $20 million to try to take out libertarian populist Thomas Massey from the House, while Trump is currently raising money for one candidate above all, and that's Lady Lindsay Graham they's going to do in Marlago.

You're absolutely right. Well, a bunch of people have advised them, including, I mean, the good faith actors in the White House that still understand the necessity of reform from a policy perspective, but also political survival perspective, is still Vance, Gabbard, Kennedy, and Colby.

And I'm sure they have recommended to the president, somebody other than neocon Mike Waltz, who we, you know, shipped off to the U.S., supposed to keep him out of stuff. He's dragged his way back in because Rubio is one of his protectors. Rubio is one of his guys. Rubio is a sneaky little guy.

I mean, he and Besson are both that way. They both, well, they like a lot of things, but not getting into their Lindsey Graham-like personal habits. They like to stab you in the back. You got to watch your backside with these guys. And they're good at that at maneuvering through the inner bureaucracy, and they have as their key allies, Swopi Susie Wiles. Wiles goes back with Rubio to Florida, way, way back.

So that's why, because you're absolutely right. He should have someone like McGregor as his national security advisor, right? He should have someone that's a geopolitical realist. I mean, originally put Flynn in that role. That's why they ran off Flynn, was they wanted to make sure he never got accurate intel. Because for all of Trump's flaws and hubris, he doesn't actually want to make decisions against good intelligence. Now, the people who breached through that now and then on the, global stage is Orban.

So, you know, it wasn't, if you noticed, Orban was right there with Trump. Normally when the foreign leader comes in, they're across from Trump. Orban was right next to him. Right next to him on the other side, J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance had dinner with Orban that night. You know, so Vance understands how Orban can get better

and more accurate information to Trump about a range of matters in Europe, and then particularly the Ukrainian conflict. And you see, there's a, instinct in Trump to not be affiliated with or aligned with Zelensky. There's an instinct in Trump, as Mir Shimer has detailed, to get us out of the entrapment of Europe. And there's been some good moves there. Like there's been some de-escalation according to a range of reports in the Balkans

where things that were marching in one direction and Trump has pulled back on some of that. There's been talk of the U.S. troops withdrawing from Romania, withdrawing from other Eastern European countries. That would be great. So there's little good signs, but on the big policy of Russia, he's completely screwed it up. And I don't even think they understand. In fact, I can say, I know they don't understand. There's anybody in the administration who understands Russia. There's just nobody. But what's even worse is they misread them. So like there is, I mean, there is a wing of the

Pentagon that really thinks Putin has no red lines. You know, as Mr. Slavic-Mar put it, or as Adovan Bismarck, put it. You know, the Russians are slow to get up on that horse, but once they do, it rides fast. And all we do is, you know, he describes it as pushing down on a spring. And at some point, that spring goes, bam, all the way back up.

And that's what's going to happen if we keep pushing Russia. But Trump was being convinced we can escalate without consequence. We can escalate without, he's all, he's always pitched, something that makes everybody happy. So, hey, with this policy, it'll actually be good for Russia because their economy is struggling and they can't win in the conflict. And you're really going to help bail out Putin of his own disastrous mistake.

So Russia will really actually be satisfied with the ceasefire deal and all this other garbage. Not only that, the deep state will be satisfied, the intelligence apparatus, the national security industry, the Wall Street will be satisfied. And your voters will be satisfied. It'll be win, win, win. Nobody can sell himself an ad like a great salesman. And Trump is a sucker for that. So that's often how they package it. They package it is win, win, win.

no losses. It's like on, so hey, let's do something on housing affordability. Okay, how about a 50-year mortgage? Banks will be happy. The voters will be happy. People, everything will be more affordable. It's like, no, no, these are often binary choices. It's either Israel or the Palestinians in certain cases. It's either Russia or Europe or Ukraine in certain circumstances. It's either Wall Street or Main Street. It's either bankers or debtors. It's not both. And he wants to hear both.

Tell me how I can get both. Tell me how I can get no opposition to this from any institutional areas of influence. And give me some fake intel. Give me some false information. I can believe and regurgitate with confidence. And that that's what we're seeing on a regular basis. Let me just an interview yesterday where people are like, he's talking about, I can't wait to bring 600,000 Chinese to

on visas to America's university. And Americans are like, what? I mean, aside from all the issues of allegations of Chinese spying all the rest, and he was like, we've got to keep these universities afloat. Most Americans would love it of half of these universities were gone tomorrow. They've been a corrupting influence on American power, American society, American institutions, American culture, the American economy. They're not huge cheerleaders of Harvard and the rest of them,

these pretentious pricks that they naturally are. So it's a constant continuous disconnect because he's, He wants to believe the false intel. He wants to believe the fake information. And that's why he needs to surround him. One way you avoid the sin of hubris is you have, the one reason I love prediction markets and putting my money where my mouth is. Because it constantly says when I'm wrong,

I get smacked in the face with lost cash. I can't pretend to live in my own delusional world. The Trump needs someone around him that smacks him in the face. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like to be told no. He likes the sycophants. He likes the flattery. But what he needs, and to be honest,

President Vance, if he wants any future political career of his own, needs to start being that guy because he can't be fired. You know, Trump can ignore him, but he can't fire him, is to start smacking Trump in the face with political reality, with economic reality. I mean, the economy here is fracturing. All the things we talked about in the summer have gotten all worse that the, we have record levels of delinquencies on credit cards, record levels of delinquency on student loan payments, record levels of delinquency in a wide range of credit spaces. We have the complete collapse of the subprime industry that was developed for used cars that is exposing all kinds of accounting fraud and tricks behind it as well. Trump was running around telling everybody the

turkey prices and Thanksgiving prices are way down because he got some sort of Walmart meme. In fact, according to his own U.S. Department of Agriculture, turkey prices are up 25%. a wide range of food costs. He stopped the radical inflation rise under the early years of Biden, but it's still inflating. It's still going up. The housing is totally unaffordable. But here's a place where he doesn't want to trade off.

All the boomers have all their capital in real estate, more than anything else. So they love those high housing prices that they're sitting on, even if they're ephemeral, even if they're more phantom than real. So, but there you have to make a choice. Either you drastically reduce the prices of housing, which is going to screw over the boomers, in order to help literally everybody else afford a house, or you screw all the people who can't afford a house for these boomers. He doesn't want to make a tradeoff. So he comes up with 50-year mortgages. He permanent life and debt, everybody. Woo-hoo. I mean, this is the degree of delusional

nonsense. And why nobody's sitting next to him and smacking him in the face, a good national security advisor, a good national economic advice. Somebody saying, no, Mr. President. Working class people are suffering. Young working class people are really suffering. Real wage growth stop. Right now, we have the highest expectations of job losses, according to the Consumer Sentiment Survey by the University of Michigan.

In history, it is even worse than the peak of the global financial crisis. And historically, it has always signaled that we're probably already in a recession. when they came up with the ingenious idea to cut off people off snap and EBT benefits right on the eve of an election and that they could have funded it with contingency funds. And so people get to see

while they're going to the voter polls a bunch of old folks, women and children lined up at the local food bank. He's busy. Look at this new gold I've designed inside the white. That's real gold, everybody. That's not that Home Depot gold. That's real gold.

And he's doing Margot, Mara, Mar-a-Lago parties at the great Gaspi. Great Gaspi. You couldn't write this. I mean, it's like let them eat cake and twice and three times and four times. And it's the degree of disconnect is partially driven by his advisors, but it's mostly driven by his choice not to have advisors around him that will smack him in the face when he goes AWOL. I completely agree. I think he needs to do a number of things. I'm not sure he can, by the way. But if he was, is listening to my advice, you need to do a number of things. He should travel less abroad and meet fewer foreign leaders,

spend more time traveling around the United States, doing what he used to do, meeting people there, talking to them, listening to what they're telling him, when they tell him about prices of turkeys and things of that kind, then he can listen to them and he can hear them because they're always, in the end, the final analysis, the place where you will get the most reliable information. That's the first thing.

The second thing is he can meet anybody he wants as president of the United States. A lot of people that in power don't understand that, by the way. But it's true. And the president of the United States, if he wants to talk to anybody at all, he can. There's lots of people in the United States who can give him advice about all sorts of things. He needs to show some curiosity. intellectual curiosity about things and about what is going on. If you look at the presidents who succeeded, people like Lincoln and Washington, by the way, and Roosevelt and Kennedy,

they were people who went out and they sought advice and they listened to advice and some of it they didn't like and some of it made them very unhappy, but they understood fully that it was part of their job. And he needs to focus on the US economy. And remember why people voted for him in the first place, which is to make their lives better, not to worry about what's going on in Venezuela or, well, Ukraine or wherever. And about the military situation in Ukraine, about all of these people giving terrible advice,

he ought to really take note of the fact that the advice these people are giving to him is wrong and listened to them less or better still, not at all. Anyway, that's my general comments about what the president should do. I don't think he's going to do any of these things. I get to say what I think about Trump. This is my own sense and I might be wrong. And if so, and you know, please correct me. I think he's a very insecure person, actually.

I think he's somebody who's come out from outside the political system. And I think he's very, very nervous of doing exactly what you said, actually making a decision. To govern is to choose. And that is what the president is for. He must choose. He must make decisions. He must go out and argue them. And if the American people sense that he's on their side, they will be on his.

So that's my last comment here. Robert, I don't know where you want to add anything. Please do. There's plenty of things he can do to reverse course. And even though he's on a tight time frame and he's got an obstructive legislative branch, he can use the executive branch and even certain contests with the legislative branch to restore. The great vice and great virtue of Trump is he can turn on a dime. So, I mean, now sometimes it feels like a reality TV show he's scripting.

And it's like, tune in next Wednesday to see whether we go to nuclear war. You know, that part of Trump, I could use a little less of. But at least he can't. But it's an asset at times. He's not ideologically tied to pretty much anything. He's the ultimate pragmatist in that respect. So his great utility, his great potentiality is that, as you mentioned, Alexander, his ability to get out of trouble when he looks completely doomed has been

extraordinary. And it's because he can turn on a dime. And if he turns on a dime, what he can do is he can do is he can, can unleash the antitrust division under Gail Slater at the Justice Department. She is OG MAGA and antitrust. And he could bring cases against Big Ag. He recently said he's going to. These are the big cartels here that have basically monopolized the food supply in the United States to the detriment of the quality of that food, to the detriment of small farmers, and to the detriment of consumers, both in terms of price and quality. He could unleash them on big tech. There's a big remedy case coming up in. Eastern District of Virginia on whether to break up Google.

Make Google sell off YouTube. Make it be independent. Break the censorship machine that some people in the State Department are recreating. People like Russians with attitude had their account canceled on YouTube. Why? Because they're using the Treasury Department and the State Department's sanctions policy on either Russia or on Palestinian-related issues to suppress anything that second-guess is Israel. It's bad enough.

You've got little Oracle man, Larry Ellison's son. I lived down the street from that guy. He was always a freak. That's a whole other story. When I lived in Malibu, he's buying up TikTok, buying up CBS, buying up Paramount. Barry Weiss is going around purging, purging some woke lunatics, but also purging anybody that second-guesses Israel

and creating a new Israel lobby propaganda machine here in the United States. That's the counterproductive path. Instead, let antitrust break up big tech once and for all to diversify the media space, diversify the agricultural space, diversify the medical insurance space, which is an ongoing scandal here in the United States, the cost and lower quality of healthcare that we've been suffering from for decades that Obamacare made worse rather than improve upon. So why Obamacare, the insurance company, stocked, went through the roof, anti-insurance company, what a cry. But there's a big antitrust case pending against

multi-plan and United Insurance connected to that, that let her loose, unleash her. Same with Harmie Dillon. Unleash her on the Civil Rights Division on all the lawfare. Unleash her on Deep State corruption and Ed Martin. Unleaser, let's see indictments of John Brennan. Let's see real indictments of James Comey, not rushed ones in Virginia. Let's see real indictments of all these rogue CIA deep state actors that try to sabotage and basically conduct a coup over the first two Trump presidencies. You can go further. Unleash Robert Kennedy, rather than constantly sabotage him, constantly try to stage coups inside his own administration of the health and human services.

Unleash him. Join the Brooke Jackson case in Texas so that Pfizer has finally held accountable where they promised a safe, effective vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19. What they delivered was dangerous, ineffective, not a vaccine, didn't prevent COVID-19. They lied and people died. And for it, this big criminal drug dealer, worried about drug dealers? Maduro shouldn't be top of that list. Pfizer should be top of that list.

Not only that, but change the rules and empower the vaccine court. Robert Kennedy is trying to do so that vaccine, big drug companies are held liable for the injuries, their products and their deceptions cause, including whether it's vaccines. Food freedom, you can further embrace it by allowing people to buy food directly from the farmer, restore the Amos Miller case, help the Amish, something that they still haven't done. Amish, I helped get out a record level of Amish voters. Independent publications reported that that by itself guaranteed Trump's presidency. So far he's done nothing for them, listening to Big Ag and corporate ag instead.

allow people to buy food directly from the farmer like they used to, and like we always did in America up until 1967, and the bureaucracy hijacked it. The look at how do you get real capital in the hands of ordinary people? You know, Adrian Kismiski's fix the system. How do you get capital in ordinary people so that they can develop business and enterprise? Don't worry about the big banks. Don't worry about Wall Street.

Worry about getting money to the hands of ordinary people. There's a bunch of people who stood by Trump when he was impeached twice, stood by Trump when he was indicted four times. stood by Trump when they tried to bankrupt him three times, stood by Trump when they tried to murder him twice. He was their, they were his ultimate defense. It is time Donald J. Trump stand by them. They have stood by him.

It's time he stand by them. And if he does, America will be in a much better place. We don't need to be an empire. Let the empire die. Restore the constitutional republic. It was rooted in. I see this complete misapplication and misappropriation of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was not a regime change doctrine.

It was opposed to regime change. How do I know? My cousin John Quincy Adams wrote the Monroe Doctrine. And that Monroe Doctrine was, no, hey, look, in fact, it starts off with every time you try to do regime change in Central and Latin America, it goes bad. That's why it's a bad idea, aside from foreign intervention being a bad idea. So restore America to its roots. Keep your promises. America will be better off.

Trump will be better off. The only question is, does he have the hooch, the guts, the courage to do it? Robert Barnes, I think that's absolutely brilliant. I agree with you're absolutely right about the problem. Well, I say he was your cousin. But again, I know the history of that very, very well. Thank you. Thank you.

That was fantastic. Alex, I don't know whether you've got anything to add there, but you've probably got nothing to add. Fantastic, but we do have some questions. So, Robert, you got about 15 minutes? Yeah, no problem. Cool. Let's start with.

Sparky, who says, hasn't Mamdami been captured by the globalist via Alex Soros and Huma Abiddeen? Isn't he Obama 2.0, aside from the signal to President Trump and Israel, won't Mamdani be business as usual for New York City? Yeah, I'm a deep skeptic of Mamdami. Now, I'll say he's a smooth politician. But when he was in the state legislature, he did mostly nothing. So he is very close with Alex Soros, the son of George Soros. now married to Huma Abidine, who was the longtime Hillary Clinton aide. And so, and it's also New York City.

Navigating the politics of New York City is going to be interesting. Navigating his relationship with the police department is going to be interesting. So how much will he actually get done? I think is very much an open question. But it wouldn't surprise me if you see some of his reforms get into practice and work better than people expect. but I don't expect any revolutionary change in New York City because Mamdami at heart is not an ideologue. It's not a Marxist, not an ideological fanatic Muslim

and other things that he's accused of on the right, nor is he a true sincere democratic socialist on the left. Everything about the guy screams, he's a politician. And as you noted Alexander in London, that mayor was similar, you know, good to change everything, though it didn't really change much at all at the end of the day. from uh clouse the good thing about young voters is that they vote less ideologically more realistically

what can politicians do for ordinary people and and they're and that's their focal point that's why they're this baffles some people in the right there is a legitimate trump momdami crossover voter working class minority millennial zoomers that be because they just want to burn down the machine half of them what they loved about doge was just different destroying stuff. They're like my two-year-old grandson who sits there and can't, you know, give him a gift or something. You can knock down. He just knocks it down, laughs. You put it back together just so you could knock it down again. They want to knock some stuff down. And the politicians that promise to knock some stuff down and deliver

are going to be the most popular with these new young voters. Lza says, Mr. Barnes, would you bet on Republicans or Democrats in 28? Could Trump lose his support? Well, Rush Limbaugh famously said, the only person who can cause Trump to support is Trump. But Trump is working really hard at fracturing that foundation. You can follow people like Mark Mitchell, Honest Polster online, Richard Barris, People's Pundant Daily online. They track public opinion and know the Trump vote are better than anybody. And both of them have been screaming warning signs for the last month,

saying that things are fracturing badly within Trump's base. As to 2026 and 28, if Trump continues on the current path, Republicans will get wiped out in 2026. It'll look like 2006. But the X factor, there's two X factors. J.D. Vance, I know there's various people that are skeptics of him. I am not. I know him. I know him personally. I have great confidence in his capacity to really deliver.

I don't think he's as infected by hubris as others. I think he sincerely, the only reason why he's running, he was already rich, he was already famous. He already had a big book and a movie written about him. Hillbilly Ellogy, that's J.D. Vance. it was for the people that were the same part of the country that I came from. And he's just the northern top of Appalachia. So he has great potential to do things differently and distinctly. And the other aspect in terms of 2028 is still the Democrats.

The Democrats are still focused on neoliberal national security establishment EU crazies. I mean, we're really happy Spanberger and Cheryl, the new governors of Virginia and New Jersey, are into, just watch them talk. And you're going to be like, if you've been stuck as Alex has, having to listen to Alex or Solar Vander crazy, you're going to get traumatic flashbacks watching these people. So as long as the Kamala Harris's of the world are in control of the Democratic Party,

Republicans always stand a chance. From Mark Hewitt, what happened to Devin Nunez? Why was he not appointed? Oh, because Nunes is running, is running truth and is getting tons of money. Even though the money isn't coming from truth social, it's coming from the ties to crypto. So they're deep ties to crypto.

And some of that's been good. Some of that, you know, I recommend the Brett Johnson interview we did of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, explains how a U.S. dollar stable coin might become a replacement central bank digital currency to control the world. There's good things with it and there's very dangerous things with it. And there's same thing there.

But that's why Nunes didn't get a post. He's cashing in as we speak at Truth Social. Be blunt about it. Right. From Jeffrey Summer, Trump recently announced an offering of a 50-year mortgages for all, in addition to the 15-year auto loans. To me, this really emphasizes Trump's capture by the Black Rock class. What are yours and Robert's thoughts on this?

Utter idiocy. More debt is not the answer. Don't we have enough debt? Even if you're not on the Austrian-Elon-Musk economics, side of whether public debt is dangerous or not. The private debt is also exploding. And so you can be on the Steve Keene side of the economic analysis and say that either way, more debt is not going to be the answer. More money to the banksters in BlackRock is not the answer. But that's what happens when Soros, Scotty Bessett is running your economic policy. New Age, Gigolo says, Robert, given the

consequence of hubris discussed earlier, how well do you think Trump and his administration really understand how mortally wounded his credibility and political capital nowadays. 90% of them don't have a clue and Trump is in complete delusion. Now I'm hoping that the delusion is temporary because in the past, whenever Trump has heard something he didn't want to hear, he's pushed back. Early COVID when he was going crazy with Fauci stuff. He didn't like to hear the Swedish counter example and so forth. But he ultimately did reverse course reluctantly.

He got dragged into it, but he did show the full capacity to reverse course. I'm hoping he's not so infected with hubris that he needs, as Alexander pointed out, a nemesis to prove the futility and danger of that hubris. From Jeffrey Summers, easy one. Favorite kinds of beer. Man, the Germans are the best of the beer. Now, my brother likes the English. I mean, remember he, my brother loves England and Switzerland. I mean, England and Seattle, because a bunch of books, interesting history and beer and chips.

that to him you know the fishing chips is like god's gift i never quite understood it myself uh i still like the belgium beers but you know i like those fruit beers and the rest so i'm not a big bitter guy i don't like you know the certain kind of bitter thing so i'm i'm more fond of the the um the lambics than anything else sparky says robert it's sad but people surrounding president trump simply lie to him about how great things are going they weaponize his ignorance trump's plenty smart but it's garbage in garbage out oh absolutely and that's why he needs people that to this now i can tell you other people the administration did get it because I heard from them the day after election day. I heard from pretty much all the reformers within the Trump administration are like,

what can we do? Now's the time. We've got to push these other policies. We've got to have a shift in direction. That's why Trump announced the change on the big act policy to say, hey, we're going to go after these big ag people. That was a product of all of those internal discussions. And so they do recognize it. The problem is the big person blocking it, gatekeeping it, is swampy Susie Wiles. The Russians were right that she is the principal problem for Trump. She is and continues to do. From John Robert's new boss, same as the old boss. We did get fooled again. However, Trump did speak to the Russians and received Putin as a legitimate state leader. Trump also did shut down illegal immigration. Yeah, Trump's successes are

on illegal immigration on some degree of defrosting the relationship with Russia and aspects of Central Europe, the, at least trying to do something on re-domesticating and re-onshoring American industry with tax and tariff policy and doing something about woke and censorship. I mean, that's why I tell me it was like, Trump's still an improvement over Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. It's like, however, all the mistakes that I'm being critical of Trump of, it would be a lot worse. You know, the, you know, I was telling me, Alex, you know, and Hillary Clinton, guy and Kamala Harris was going to get in. I was going to have to figure out the where his grandfather's maps of the old caves he could

hide out in Cyprus when they were fighting the Brits. because it was going to get real ugly, real fast. So Trump has still been an improvement, but nowhere near what he himself wants to be, he himself needs to be, and the country needs him to be. So the criticism is constructive, not destructed. Robert, can you address the Peter Thiel in Vance?

Vance is no better Peter Thiel puppet. I think that people see the, so Vance was involved with the tech world and involved with Peter Thiel, got wealthy in part because of that. And so for that, that leads to skepticism. Now, there's a lot of skepticism about Teal that I don't quite share. See, I'm not a huge Teal fan, but I'm not a huge Teal opponent.

To me, Bill Gates and George Soros matter far more than Peter Thiel and influence. And Teal's kind of all over the place ideologically as to where he's going to go. I'm increasingly skeptical of where Palantor is trying to go. But Vance himself has been the highest profile critic of certain aspects. They asked the same question, Turning Point USA, down in Oxford, Mississippi. Notice two big things about Vance. He highlighted that we would not be reflexively deferential to Israel and that we would only be aligned with Israel when it was in the U.S. interest to do so.

That is a major break that was undercovered by some of the institutional press. And he also said, we need to monitor to prevent a surveillance state and enhance privacy protection. So the connections to Teal are greatly exaggerated in terms of their influence on vans. All right. From Sparky, Robert, President Trump wanted terrorists, but Besson applied at 2000. nine tariff plan design to crash the world economy as highlighted by Brian Berletic,

not the McKinley-style tariffs Trump had in mind. Yeah, Bessett is consistently sabotaged from within Trump's tariff policy to make sure it wouldn't work because I don't believe you was ever on board. From one sec. From Baby Jane, how is the naval shipbuilding progressing? Well, the problem is our military industrial complex, is not only a corrupting influence on government, as President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1961, and the way it would corrupt academia. They ignored that second part.

He was saying the academics would be bought off by federal funding and federal grants, and that would actually corrupt science writ large, as we ultimately saw in examples like COVID. So the problem is, you know, we should be able to build up fast. Like in World War II, we shocked the Germans at how fast we were able to build up militarily. But then the difference was we had a huge industrial base then. Now we don't. It's like Europe's going around yipping. They're like that little dog. There's all these memes with these little dogs.

You know, next day's big dog, the little dogs yipping, yippin, yippin, then they open the door and the big dog gets to walk in. The little dog's like, looking around. That's Europe. And pretending, but we have similar problems. I mean, we can't scale up. We, in terms of, because our industrial base is crap. If your industrial basis, now, we don't have the problem of Europe.

if we have access to lots and lots and lots of cheap energy in the United States. That gives us a real edge in that regard. But until we re-industrialize, we're not going to be able to rebuild up our military support for things like naval ships. I mean, our shipyard building is a crock as a joke. I mean, we thought just putting a port fee on China would somehow boost it. We got to re-industrialize, and we really need to take away the entire private sector military industrial complex,

not only to avoid its corrupting influence on American policy, but because it's the only way you can scale up quickly. Russia's proven this, like the trade policy. Russia's import substitution policy, as they call it, is indistinguishable from what Trump's good economic tariff policy could have been. Same thing. But until we reindustrialize our, and re-domesticate our industrial base, we're going to be way behind militarily and continue to be way behind militarily. OMG Puppies says, have you seen Al Jazeera's documentary on the Israel lobby in the U.S.? It's troubling, but maybe the documentary effect, as Scott Adams says.

They're infected. The Israel lobby is infected with hubris. You see it in the end when you see the sort of dying throws of a dying empire, and in this case, the Israel lobby in the United States, you could classify as one. It was always misunderstood the Israel approval in the U.S. People can go back and look at a what-of-the-odd show with Richard Barris, People's Pundant Daily, YouTube and Rumble and his local page as well. we did a deep dive of the entire 75 plus year history of public opinion on U.S. and Israel.

And like a lot of people, both the left libertarians and the institutional right, thought, for example, evangelical Christians really love Israel. And that the Christian Zionism movement is an organic, authentic extent. No, it never was. It was a grassroots group. It was an astro-turf group, not a grassroots group, created by televangelist in the mid-70s, early 80s. One of them, the founder of Christian Zionism, was a guy who got caught by his wife, given the missionary position to one of his petitioners who wasn't the white. And that's why he suddenly felt the need to discover,

oh, I'm a Christian Zionist now. We got to talk about Israel because he was kicked out of his church. That's why. The once televangelism collapsed, and it did in the middle 80s, because of scandal, after scandal, after scandal, after scandal, a lot of Christian Zionism died with it as the religious right became less of an ongoing organized political force in the United States. Because that was a political, convenient marriage.

APEC went to the Jerry Falwell and others and said, hey, will you leverage all our influence to support your agenda? You agree to leverage your support for our agenda. But much of that was built on pro-life and other issues which have mooted in the national public discourse. So that was also going to fade out. Once the Cold War was ever was over, one of the key Israel allies in the Court of Public Opinion was that they were on the American side, not the Soviet side during the Cold War. Once the Cold War ended, that was going to fade. As the risk of Islamic terrorism faded post-9-11, then the Israel fed heavily into the fear of Islamic terrorism to justify Israel's support.

Israel was going to fade. And the moment, Bibi Netanyahu, we said all the way back, if you go full to raise Gaza, you're going to lose support. Bibi Netanyahu's hubris has completely killed the Israel lobby in the United States. And so they're clinging on to the last vestiges of power, disproportionate influence and media and money. And they're hoping they can spend 20 million to beat Thomas Massey in the House, hoping they can prop up Lindsey Graham against multiple challengers in South Carolina,

like Paul Dan's and others, that they're hoping that they can gaslight the world into not wanting to watch Tucker Carlson. Good luck with that. They have completely lost the script, and they don't understand. Israel is already a political pariah in the Democratic Party. Israel is now a political pariah amongst any voter under 50. including evangelicals. Every time they go out and do some sermon and say that if you don't love Jesus,

unless you love B.B. Netanyahu, this foreign government somehow related to the covenant with Israel in the Old Testament, a complete heresy against evangelical beliefs. I get tons of texts from my evangelical friends about how enraged that makes them, how insulting and offensive they find that. So the Israel lobby is busy burning itself down. in the United States. And in five to ten years,

it will have, Israel will be a political pariah amongst all parties in the U.S. And the Israel lobby is nobody but to blame but that, for them, but themselves, and B.B. Netanyahu. From Chunky Monkey 329, will the Supreme Court loss on tariffs

push Donald J. Trump to war? I think, I think they won't require an immediate refund, which will take a little political pressure off of them. Trump will go back and use the four statutes and create a more economic, industrial policy-based tariff policy that is well legally rooted. And the Supreme Court will likely give them a roadmap for doing it because to my surprise, to a degree, the corporatist, what I call the corporatist or the centrist or the institutionalist, Barrett and Kavanaugh wanted to give them that some level of authority, that they're so technocratic in the way they approach the law, especially Barrett. She's like one of those people that can't understand policy,

but, you know, would focus on, well, if you look at exemption number 3.4A under, you know, that kind of analysis for the law, kind of drives me nuts, but it's those kind of people. But she wanted, by her questioning, she wants to give him a roadmap for how he can do it. And so the, so hopefully use it for that. I think the risk of war like Venezuela, Maduro already promised to give us everything.

So it's not even about the oil. It's about ego. It's about hubris. It's, hey, hey, hey, look, you know, after humiliated by his failure to deliver on promises to Russia, humiliated at not being able to change Iranian policy on nuclear non-proliferation,

humiliated on losing out to China because Soros-Scotti gave him bad intel advice. He wants to show off and say, see, yes, we are still mighty and powerful. Kind of like when Reagan invaded Grenada after we had to pull out of Syria, out of Beirut. You know, we're still powerful. We can dispatch

and get rid of Maduro. I think that's what's motivating it more than anything else. But he is having second thoughts because of the massive pushback by Tulsi Gabbard. and within the administration. People are saying bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, don't do it, don't do it, it's all going to go to it sideways. And so I don't think that's, he'll do it.

But I don't think tariffs will cause that. I think he will recreate a new tariff and trade policy. It just won't be as impactful as it could have been because of his own political overreach. Jai Bison says, what happened to Tulsi Gabbard? Tulsi's still the real deal. But they have been, they neutered her using the Israel lobby. Part of, like some people have been asking Scott Horton and others, why some of us on the MAGA populace side started reversing course and escalating our criticism of Israel.

It's because of the Israel lobby. They kept removing key populist people throughout the administration with their corrupting influence. It's one thing to block the Mearsheimers of the world and the McGregors of the world. It's quite another to remove people because they ever said anything, second-guessing, any aspect of Israeli policy. And so that's what began the reversal. But they used the Iran war to sideline her. Say, oh, you know, she said that Iran wasn't about to build nuclear weapons. Mr. President, that outrageous?

Remember Trump would get enraged any time they asked the question because he didn't like being called on his lie as the reality of it. That was just a flat out lie. Iran was not about to make nuclear weapons. They're closer to it now probably than they were before, or at least the intention to do so than they were before. So that's what they did to sideline her. and then Susie Wiles constantly sabotaged her. They've constantly undermined people within her office. Like they came back with contrary information on Venezuela.

That was part of that DNI report in March of 2025. And several of the people affiliated it were then removed or moved into another office. So there's just been, and Ratcliffe has been the main rat in all of this. At least Steve Bannon has outed him correctly. Ratcliffe has been the one constantly sabotaging Gullb Gabbard over and over again. doesn't want Gabbard to control the CIA, doesn't want him to oversee the CIA, doesn't want her to contest and challenge the CIA. So bad, counterfeit Cash Patel, who's busy running around on his government-funded plane

to see his girlfriend, who's busy suing Elijah Schaefer and everybody who ever says that she was ever a Mossad asset of any kind, the, that's how I'm not saying, he, when Joe Kent, who was right there working with Gabbard, wanted to investigate the global Antifa connection to the murder. of Charlie Kerr, counterfeit cash, ran into the White House using Susie Wild, Swampy Susie, to say this needs to be shut down immediately, and the FBI has to have exclusive jurisdiction over this. So that's what's happened.

The rogue bad fate actors within the administration have constantly tried to blacklist and sabotage any effort by Tulsi Gabbard to get accurate intel and information to the president, and the president's encouraged it and incentivized it by how he handled the Iran-Iran conflict. But she's still there. She's, plus the way, if we don't go to war with Venezuela, you have one person to thank

and it'll be Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, true. Nico says, did you see the wizard of the Kremlin trailer? It's not cringe. It's insulting. At least Angelina Choli's driver was kidnapped.

That's a good clown world. That's what's Jude Law, I believe, the wizard of the Kremlin, right? Don't drive around the, yeah, I haven't seen that yet. I heard it was actually decent and wasn't, it's hard for me to believe because U.S. and British Hollywood productions

are so universally, obsessively anti-Russian. I mean, BBC even started, who recently got caught doctoring Trump tapes in order to make it look like he called for an insurrection, the British Broadcast Corporation. But, you know, they were going back over the last,

ever since Ukraine in 2022. And then they're like rewriting the whole history of British Russian relations. And it's like, oh, it's always, how did we ever side with Russia against the evil, against the good, wonderful Germans. Good wonderful Germans. I mean, you know, they're talking about different parts of history and the rest, just making up fictional, fabricated, fantastical stuff. So I would love to see an honest film, but I'll have to

see how to actually see it to believe it. Yeah, let's see. Let's see, Nicos, how that film is. From Sparky, Robert, U.S. remembers the Monroe Doctrine, as Europe should stay out of the U.S. his yard. What's usually forgotten is the Monroe Doctrine says this is contingent on the U.S. staying out of Europe's yard. And staying out of regime change altogether. I encourage people to go back and read the statement of President Monroe to Congress in 1829 that is the foundation of this. Or I'm sorry, 1827. The, maybe 1830, well, every year it was. There's a long statement to Congress that is the Monroe doctor. The whole thing starts off with how regime change is a bad idea, how, hey, may come in with great intentions, et cetera.

Maybe Spain has the best intentions, maybe England, maybe France, but maybe Portugal, but it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It backfires and hurts us here in the U.S. So the sphere of influence wasn't just the excluding Europe from regime change. It was excluding the U.S. from regime change, but it's also correct that we always were against getting a symbol in Europe as a predicate for this. this is why the same man who wrote the Monroe doctor, John Quincy Adams, said,

America's founded on one principle. We do not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. And all the deep state is done for the last better part of a century is searched for monsters, usually make-belief, to destroy in the name of justifying foreign war. Jeffrey Summer says, Professor Zhang, the other day mentioned the U.S. actions in Venezuela appear as a pivot to the Monroe Doctrine Strategy. Is this an opportunity for the U.S. to isolate itself and slowly move home? To a degree. So Eldridge Colby's position, I recommend the first person Tucker Carlson interviewed after the election was Eldridge Colby. Not a coincidence. As mentioned, Eldridge Colby's

grandfather was Bill Colby. He was one of these old school cold warriors, you know, Catholic behind the lines in World War II, grew up with the OSS and the CIA, got caught up in operational, Operation Phoenix and all the rest. And as soon as he gets to be CIA director, he's the one who outs the family jewels. All the CIA disclosures come from him. And because of it, he gets sacked by the then advisors to President Ford, who were Poppy Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney,

who recently died. May he rest in hell. And so you look at those dynamics, and you can see with Colby, he said, we're not in a position to wage war in Russia. We're not in a position to wage war with China. We have diminished military stocks. We don't have the political capital. Even if it were advisable, and he makes the point, maybe it's not advisable.

But his point is you've got to at least withdraw to some degree of sphere of influence focus. He's the one who authored the Pentagon opinion a couple of months ago that came out with that refocus. But it's not going into Venezuela is not part of that. That's Narco Marco's desire. You won't find Eldridge Colby talking about how he need to invade a bunch of South American country. That was not what he meant by that. He meant rebuild it home first before you can ever project power abroad anyway. The life of Brian says, hoping for Trump to change is worse than a letter to Santa. The course now is to turn everyone, including the boomers against Trump.

Well, I mean, I understand that sentiment. I think Trump is still the best hope for populist causes of the near short term. And that's why I think the best advice is to encourage the reformers within the administration to motivate him to at least take the least negative action. These days, you're not always hoping for a promising positive action. Just please don't blow up the world. Please don't have us, you know, small things. No nuclear war, please, on the agenda. Let's do one more from Sparky.

Final one from Sparky. Robert, one good thing about the recent so-called ceasefire in Gaza is it gave local Christian charity an excuse to finally stop flying the Israeli flag without losing funding from Israel. It's fun to see throughout Europe when they're going in and taking down the Ukrainian flag. which is still mind-boggling. You can go to some small German town hall, and it's the Ukrainian flag flying above it. You know, the Czech leader, first thing he's doing

is taking down the Ukrainian flag. It's nice to see, you know, Osmond Gold, a popular young YouTuber. He's like, look, he goes, I don't have anything against Israel, but Israel is to the right, what trans is to the left, an issue that only the elite support

the ordinary voters think is insane. And he goes, here you have a picture of Governor Abbott with seven Israeli flags. He's like, why not say, seven American flags. Could we have at least a few fewer Israeli flag? But Mark Levin, that crowd can yip all they want. Israel is a dying empire because of its own hubris in terms of the greater Israel project that Bibi Netanyahu was launching. And the Israel lobby is fading the U.S. and it will be gone in five to ten years as a meaningful, politically impactful factor.

The best way to win office will increasingly be to run against Israel, not run with them. And again, that's the fault of the Israel lobby and B.B. Netanyahu. Life of Brian says, I don't know who the wizard of the Kremlin is, but Brezhnev is his driver. All right. Thank you, Life of Brian, for that. And thank you, Robert Barnes, for an amazing live stream. Once again, Robert, where can people follow your work? For all the law and politics analysis, deep dive into Trump's SCOTUS tariffs, hush-hushes on alternative narratives, like January 6th.

As it turns out, a CIA asset was the person planting the pipe bombs as a capital police. as a Capitol Police officer and all that was hidden. The same person instigated what happened in the riot by shooting pepper balls at the crowd at the beginning. Turns out all that's being hidden by even this administration, but outed by the people. Well, you know that in advance

if you watch the first ever hush-hush at Vibaba Barnes Law. Dotlobalt.com. View all the predictions on elections, including around the world. We'll have some up soon on the Hungarian elections. did well on the Polish elections, did well in the Czech elections, Argentine elections.

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all the law and geopolitics. Otherwise, at Viva Barnes, law. Dot locals.com. Second only to the Duran. Dotlogos.com in terms of vibrant fun communities to be apart. Absolutely. All right. I will have all those links in the description box down below and as a pin comment. And the remaining super chat questions, me and Alexander will answer in a dedicated video. So we will get all of those questions knocked out as well. Robert, thank you for joining us. That was an epic live stream. Fantastic. Alexander, you're muted. An absolutely epic live stream. Thank you. To de force, if I could say.

Thank you to everybody that joined us. Take care.