The Duran Podcast - Populism and the Deep State w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Populism and the Deep State w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

voila okay we are live with alexander mercudis and joining us this evening evening in cyprus we have the one and only the great robert barnes robert how are you doing where can people find your work absolutely i always glad to be here the uh you know i always get sort of different feedback uh the folks that follow the uh that follow you guys uh the routinely both your individual channels and the Duran channel. The, and always try to explain that the Duran is basically like if you had your own personal private intelligence agency that,

you know, trying to provide objective analysis about the entire world, try to provide predictive capacity as to what someone's likely to do or not do, whether something's likely to work or not work. There's any bias, it's biased towards peace and bias towards prosperity. Otherwise, but of course,

people always want you to take sides. It's got to be Russia or Ukraine. It's got to be Israel or Iran. It's got to be U.S. or China. And, you know, that would interfere with the ability to provide as independent objective analysis as you can in that context. And there's some better and bad faith actors along the way interpreting what's going to occur. For those unfamiliar, you know, my perspective comes from a populist American perspective with ties in Trump world. I've either represented or I'm friends with President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary Kennedy, Director Tulsi Gabbard.

But I come from that populous side of the aisle, involved in law and politics in the United States, and I like to bet on elections. We'll see about the Polish elections upcoming. These days, you always have to factor in the fraud factor, but it's taking on a whole new meaning in Europe, European elections and elsewhere. You try to estimate where things are going to go, try to put my money where my mouth is in trying to be predictive and analytical. It's always funny because I'll either get feedback that says, oh, they hate Trump. Now, you know, get those, that crowd that doesn't like one particular interpretation. My favorite stuff is, you know, when I'm on or some other people who are on that are more part of Trump world. It's well, we now know what the two A's and MAGA stand for.

It stands for Alex and Alexander. That was my favorite critique. The, so can't win for tribe. But it's always a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The, if you want to follow all of the law and politics content about America, that's at bibobarnslaw. dot locals.com. I put up all the predictions for betting on elections. We'll have some up later today on the Polish elections.

I think there may be some good odds there at sportspicks. Dot locals.com. I do have some recommended additional merch for the excellent Duran shop. I'm thinking you do a combined package of Macron's magic handkerchief with merch's magic straw. And apparently we'll have the same effect on your brain as cane, from what we witnessed in the film. Let's have some fun. Just don't get slapped. Yeah, exactly. I'm surprised if Trump was being real Trump or if he was just feeling alone, he would throw himself

in there somehow, you know, like he did with Bruce Springsteen hitting a golf ball and Bruce Springsteen falls down and, you know, have his face behind the scenes of smacking macaron. But, you know, it's not going to help the whole, you know, the, you know, various theories out there about whether his wife really wears the pants and the family, maybe more ways than one, with that kind of slap right for the world to see. And Robert, I am digging the Duran hat, baseball hat.

Yeah, I love you. Looking good, looking good. All right, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. So Alexander, Robert, let's just jump into it. Hello to everybody that's watching and thank you to our moderators. Let's talk about some news. A huge amount to talk about because of course there's a massive amount going on around the world,

but there's also a massive amount going on in the United States. And I'm going to make a suggestion, which is that one of the things that people get wrong about Donald Trump is that they assume that his overriding priority is to go around the world's either sorting out wars in various places or ending wars in other places or starting wars in places. My own view is completely different. I believe that Donald Trump's priorities lie within the United States itself.

If you don't understand that about Trump, you've understood nothing. Other presidents are all about foreign policy. Joe Biden, I think ultimately, to the extent that he was a president at all. I mean, I'm not talking about the man himself, maybe his administration. But it was primarily about foreign policy. Donald Trump is about the United States. is connected to a massive electoral base in the United States, the strongest, most cohesive electoral base that any president has had for a very long time,

arguably back to Ronald Reagan. And at the same time, he is most concerned about change within the United States. And of course, he's running up against all sorts of people within the United States. who do not desire change. And amongst them is what you might call America's permanent government, only it's not actually permanent. It's not been around in historical time for very long.

It really developed basically in the 1960s, but it has become very powerful. And it is what we call the deep state. And I think Donald Trump is fighting. It has to fight it all the time, because they are fighting him. They won't let go and they won't stop. And I think a lot of what we're seeing in the United States

is partly about that. And they've got their friends within the administration. They've got their friends in Congress. They've got their friends in the Washington bureaucracy. They've got their friends in the judiciary as well. And the Democratic Party is, in my opinion, aligned to them. It's to allied to them so much. that you could almost say that it's part of them.

And within the Republican Party, it has its friends also. So am I right in this, Robert? I mean, that is my own perception. I think that most of the time Donald Trump is worrying, thinking about what these people are trying to do. And inevitably, that affects the time he's able to give to other matters and his room for maneuver as well. And in some respects, given that, you know,

we're now plus 100 days from him, he's being inaugurated. And he dominates the political scene in the United States to an extent that no president that I can remember since Reagan has done, you have to say he's actually played

his political cards with quite a lot of skill and maneuvered very deftly. But anyway, What are your thoughts about this, Robert? Yeah, I mean, I think the great adversary of peace and prosperity around the world is the American deep state. Now, some people call it national security establishment, military industrial complex, the administrative state, you know, you can use whatever nomenclature you want. But the idea of the deep state comes from the dual state, originated Britain or the publisher at the economist, late 19th century,

trying to explain how you could have a government completely immune from elections. and that this whole administrative bureaucracy, colonial bureaucracy, had built up that was acting independent of the will of the voters in Britain. And in the U.S., when you apply that dual state intellectual construct to the national security apparatus, when you tie in law enforcement, you tie in parts of the judicial branch, tie in parts of institutional media, academia, the think tank world, as well as their representatives in the House and the Senate, then they're supposed to be representing their constituents, but often that's not who they're representing. because of the capture of the donor class by deep state and the media by deep state aligned interest. That's the most destabilizing force in the world and has been now since the 1960s at least. There are various efforts to create a deep state in the United States.

First meaningful effort was during the Civil War that there's some that believe the assassination attempt on President Lincoln was in fact a first ever deep state coup attempt because they attempted also to take out the vice president, secretary of state, and General Grant, all in the same night, often forgot, unless you're watching a TV show like Timeless, for example, that gets into it. The, as just a, you know, fiction plot, narrative point. The, and then they rebuilt, they tried to rebuild after World War I. There was a lot of political blowback here in the United States.

Great senators like Gerald Nye, comes from the great Republican populist anti-war tradition. This is, you know, Smedley Butler, war is a racket. He did the war racketeering. committees and the Senate, leading into World War II, but World War II helped consolidate their power. Right after that, they were able to institutionalize their power within the Pentagon, represented by some of generals like Curtis LeMay, bombs away, LeMay, who was so proud of firebombing Dresden that he went in firebomb Tokyo. The people who said, hey, we got where ahead on the nuclear weapons, let's use them. They wanted to invade Russia. They wanted to invade China. They wanted to

conquer the world. Eisenhower held them back, but even Eisenhower was so intimidated by their power that he didn't say anything about it until his farewell address on the way out. He warns about the military industrial complex. And people forget, he also warned about the administrative state. He said it's going to co-opt and corrupt academia, institutions, think tanks. All of his predictions, unfortunately, came to fruition. President Kennedy discovered it in live time, and when he took any actions to try to curtail their excesses, they murdered him. When his brother ran for president five years later, they murdered him. And in the interim, they murdered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, King being America's arguably greatest unelected political

hero in our history. Then, of course, they impeach President Nixon. Some would say because that he was trying to challenge deep state power in his own way, namely maybe for his own power. But that led to the only sort of rectification or remedy about truth and reconciliation, if you will, of American deep state power with the church committee. And that was because Senator Frank Church coming from the populist tradition out of Idaho that you used to be strong there. And the because he'd been spied on. He was the first senator spied on by the National Security Agency. That led to M.K. Ultra being exposed, the assassination coup attempts around the world being exposed.

Some remedy in a sense of some people fired like Mark Felt, who was deep throat, really it was deep state working with Bob Woodward, who's long been a deep state ally, contrary to conventional wisdom, was presented as the contrary and all the president's men. But that didn't last very long. You know, even Nixon would argue for the pardon of Mark Felt to President Reagan, not knowing that Felt was the one who overthrew him in the first place. And so that what, and it's like what Putin said in his interviews with Oliver Stone. He said, I think a lot of these American political leaders want to do good,

actually want peace, but it doesn't matter. Once they get in, the men in gray suits run the world and run America's foreign policy. And you're absolutely right. Trump comes from an old American populist tradition that has been forgotten in parts of the American political and global political world, which is America was founded on anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-colonial ambitions. And the deep state is a direct opposition to all of that. The famously President Adams said, we do not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. America was founded in particular at staying the heck out of Europe. Stay out of European conflicts, stay out of European problems, stay out of Europe. issues, don't become involved in that. McKinley would, and Teddy Roosevelt would kindly, would shift that to a degree, but it would stay continental. Our interest would be on the Americas, not outside of the America. World War I was a deviation from that. World War II was a deviation from that. But from World War II, they institutionalized their power within the bureaucracy. And they've only aggregated more and more and more of it to where today, like Trump's

biggest opposition on anything he does on foreign policy, isn't from the American electorate. It isn't from the ordinary person. It is entirely from this deep state apparatus that has so much institutionalized power. And it's what he, like on Ukraine, the needle he's trying to go through is with his MAGA base on the way hand that wants us out of these dumb wars.

And the deep state on the other hand, and where does Trump experience that? He experienced it in person. Not only does he realize and no, that's what happened to the Kennedy brothers, is their opposition to deep state priorities, got them killed. But he first, he just says,

let's get along with Putin. What happens, they launch a massive investigation and a massive spy campaign of him and his entire campaign, his entire family for two years. It started with spy gate under Comey and then continued with Mueller. Then he says, well, maybe we should just at least halt how much arms we send to Ukraine. Maybe we just halt this to figure out what all the corruption is connected to Biden and the rest. And they impeach him. I mean, all he did was delay it. He didn't stop. It didn't prevent it. Didn't prohibit. It just delayed it. And they impeached him. Then he goes further. he discloses that he stayed out of war with Iran after he left office his first term and they indict him. I mean, one of the grounds of the indictment was that he shared the fact that he

blocked the Iranian war plan that Millie and others were trying to goad him into. And last but unfortunately not least, they tried to murder him not once but twice. And the second assassin, the first assassin has like M.K. Ultra Manchurian candidate tattooed on his forehead, you know, eight different phones, all kinds of missing evidence, things that just don't any sense at all. Incredibly unexplained to this day, secret security lapses. Of course, if you listen to Dan Benjino, you wouldn't know that because he and Cash Patel are busy being dogwalked by the deep state as we speak to give you an idea about the deep state power. So entrenched, so institutionalized, two very verbal vocal opponents, wussed out very quickly

within 100 days of any meaningful challenge of using their law enforcement power to clean up what is a poisonous tree that was planted. in the roots by Jay Edgar Hoover himself. There was no way that agency was going to be anything but a deep state ally rather than a deep state adversary. And of course, the second assassin has Ukraine tattooed on his forehead, kept going in Ukraine, kept trying to get missiles through Ukraine, all the rest. And all of this, they're trying to cover up and hide and mask and doing. But Trump realizes it. Okay, if I challenge the American deep state, they're going to investigate me, impeach me, indict me,

and try to murder me. So that's the real restraint. Like legally, there's no restraint on Trump just saying, I'm done with it. And there's no political restraint in terms of the American will and the American opinion. And if he was serious about trying to get a peace deal with Ukraine, Trump knows leverage like nobody does, like no president previous. I mean, that's his wheelhouse. The weak party is who you put pressure on in a negotiation. The weak party is Ukraine.

The weak party is Zelensky. They're getting whooped in the war, like we predicted what happened. it's an unpopular war, as we also predicted what happened. And the years ago at the time, to some questions and controversy, allegations were all Putin plants and the rest. And so I think actually when Trump came in, by the way, I think he was actually on board with the same advice you guys were giving from the inception, which is just to get out of the conflict.

Because if he wanted to actually negotiate a peace, you let the Department of Justice leak that they're doing an investigation on money, laundering related to Ukraine that would implicate all the military industrial complex folks that would implicate zolensky uh implicate all of zolensky's allies because they've committed massive crimes on a massive scale uh and you you know you put that leverage on them and then the other leverage you say is we're going to withdraw all support all aid all the rest and you're probably going to prison for life and your friends and allies and your m ic friends and allies here in the united states are going to be under investigation and indictment and potential imprisonment much like uh what mark felt well and the other

deep state allies were in the late 1970s after the revelations of the church committee. He didn't do any of that. And I, in my view, it's not because he's necessarily ideologically influenced by the neocons that he himself has brought into aspects of his administration, whether it's Mike Walts or General Kellogg or others. I think it's because his recognition of deep state power in America is just very broad, very deep. And that they've tried to do everything possible to take him out the moment he just breaches

is a little bit of their paradigm of the way America should use its political, economic power to facilitate deep state corruption around the globe. But I do think he wants out. Now, I think with Trump, you can almost never know for sure what he's saying on foreign policy because so much of it is posture. You're absolutely right about fundamentally. Trump sees foreign policy as a distraction. He sees foreign governments and foreign entanglements and foreign wars

as things that just distract and detract from American policy, America's self-interest, America's economic well-being. He does have a peacnick proclivity. He opposed the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. In the mid-1980s, he volunteered to try to negotiate a peace deal in Central America for a period of time he went down there. The CIA told Reagan to pull him out because they said he was a closet piecenet. So there is a proclivity towards his that he really doesn't,

he has aversion. war. And that's contra the sort of public perception he likes to make of the machismo. You know, I'm a tough guy. We'll knock out anybody all the rest. And that's part of his political personality for sure. But it's not really in his bones. If you look, I mean, what he bragged about more than anything from his first term was that he entered no new wars while he was president. And he locked himself in to being out out of Ukraine at some point and not further escalating and elevating activities in Ukraine by his own positions over the last four years, being highly critical of the war, saying it was a dumb war, saying it was a war only because

he wasn't president and so on and so forth. But what he has to navigate is he's got a lot of political will behind him, but he's got an incredibly entrenched deep state. And that deep state has powers in multiple places. It staffs everything. The reason why they took over large parts of the academy and the think tank world is because those people end up writing the policies at the State Department, the Defense Department, even the FBI, even the Justice Department. They're the main staffers on the Hill, the Senate in the House, that the finding dissident, independent, populist voices up there is exquisitely difficult because of how much they've corrupted and co-opted these institutions, as Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1961.

It's not just the lobbyist. It's not just the defense industry. They've got allies everywhere. And consequently, Trump has adversaries everywhere. Now, their personification of representation, if you want to see what they're thinking in terms of publications, you can, you know, you'll follow the foreign relations committee. You can follow the foreign affairs journal, those kind of places, to some degree, Brookings and Heritage and some others. But for the most part, you can just follow whatever a nutty notion Senator Graham has. I don't think Trump is personally friends with Graham.

I mean, he really bullied the crap out of Graham and beat him up during the 2016 primaries. so much so that he wanted to make fun of Graham by giving out Graham's cell phone number accidentally to the whole world. So all kinds of people were calling and all the rest. Graham had to change his number. But he does recognize Graham represents this deep state power. And they have power within their main power congressional is within the Senate. The how many people are truly allied with them open question. They won't admit these days in the MAGA era, many Republican senators that their deep state ally align. But most of them are. They know that the donor class can cut them off.

I can, in fact, give some context for this particular aspect. When I talked to J.D. Vance, when he was running for the Senate in February of 2022 on the question of Ukraine. And he knew of me because of the election work from 2020 and because of the grant. And so he like Kennedy, people that are in Gabbard's group, et cetera, watch the show and are fans of the show. And he wanted to get all of my takes on what I thought about Ukraine, much of which was informed by you guys. And so we had a very long conversation. And at the end of it, he had a policy determination that further engagement in Ukraine was a bad idea, not in America's interest, would be bad for American soldiers, would be bad for America writ large. But he said, here's going to be my hurdle.

He goes, if I take this position on this issue, I'm going to start getting funding problems. for my campaign. There's all of a sudden going to be a lot of money coming into my opposition. There's going to be hit pieces on me in the Wall Street Journal the next day. I'm going to have the media, the think tank, the donor class all aligned against me. And so is it influential that I make a public policy position now at the very beginning of my Senate campaign in Ohio that could derail my entire political future? And we're talking about it was like, why are you running? I mean, it was already wealthy between the book, the movie deal, in the head in the tech investments. He was already famous.

I highly recommend people to watch the films available in the U.S. and maybe around the world, depending on where you're at, on Netflix about J.D. Vance's life story. That's Hillbilly Elegy. The really good depiction of where he came up, what his background was. But I remember saying, it was like, why, I was like, why are you running? You have wealth, you have fame.

And he said he was running because he doesn't want other soldiers to experience what he experienced, when he volunteered for Iraq based on a political lie. He's like, I'm not going to see more people die for a lie. And that, by the way, is an underestimated aspect of like Pete Hegseh has the same view. Others have, because I've talked to Hexeth about this. So others have this same view that they felt betrayed by the Iraq war, betrayed, not by the military, betrayed by the deep state,

betrayed by American politicians, betrayed by the American press, that they saw their brothers. This is Memorial Day here in the United States. The hat-tipped to all the veterans. The suffered death, suffered disability, suffer lifelong injury. People like Richard Barris,

people's pundit daily, the best American pollster by far that's out there. You can follow him on YouTube, Rumble, and other places. He had the same experience. They felt personally betrayed by that war. And they have not forgotten.

They have not forgiven. And they'll hold the line where they can. And that's why he's like, I'm going to go ahead and take this position. He was the only major Senate candidate at the time in either party to come out right away at the very beginning of the conflict and say, we're not going to get further involved in Ukraine. I'm not going to support a no-fly zone. I'm not going to support any of it.

I ended up winning. And then he ended up becoming vice president. And in fact, I would say he's the future of America's foreign policy. It's going to be JD Van. Trump is here for four years. We're going to go with Steve Bannon and talking about running a third time and all that. That's not happening. And Trump will step back because Trump's.

trying to build, Trump's not trying to build a movement. Trump's just Trump. A movement has come up around him. But the person who is trying to build a movement to intellectually restructure America's foreign policy is Vice President Vance. And they have their allies. Robert Kennedy's on the Vance side of the aisle. Tulsi Gabbard's on the Vance side of the aisle. Pete Higseth is on the Vance side of the aisle. And then there are the people that Trump has brought in, every bad faith actor in the Trump administration that will fail will have connections to a particular institute. It's the America First Policy Institute, not to be confused with America First Legal. America First Legal is Stephen Miller, very smart, capable, able advocate on Trump, primarily principally on immigration policy and on discrimination policy.

America First Institute was one of these fake America First groups that was funded by Big Oil out of Texas, connected to former governor Rick Perry, that their goal was to divert Trump's movement back towards mainstream institutional conservative. To them, as you point out, Alexander, America first for Trump literally means America first. It means worry about America first, American workers first, American safety first,

American security first. And all these deep state and economic globalist priorities, he sees as anti-American first and the hurdle, the obstacle, the problem for America to be able to reach the peace and process. clarity he wants it to obtain. America First Policy Institute wants to recreate that as to America number one that, you know, dominate the world. And you get some of these uber macho fake, Mike Walses, is one of these guys that, well, you know, oh, America First means we're number one here and we're

number one here and we're the unipa polar power of the world. That is not at all what Trump means or any of Trump's voters mean by America first, a term borrowed from the protest movement against World War II in the 1940s. that they thought was a slur, by the way. New York Times thought they were slurring Trump. He said, my God, he sounds like an America first guy. And Trump read it. It was like, oh, I love that.

America first. That's it. He grabbed it from a slur. He made it into a campaign. So what Trump is trying to navigate is the deep-seated corruption of American power and policies by the deep state military industrial complex national security apparatus that uses ever. And their tools are they got allies of the Justice Department.

They got allies in the judiciary. They got allies in the Senate. They got allies in the media. They got allies in the think take world. So that's the, and they've proven to him very personally, how they can escalate his individual risk if he challenges their agenda. Trump's advantages, his assets, is he has the American people on its side. That the American people who are done with this, they've been done with it for a while.

They never voted for it. They never supported it. They never embraced it. That the only times they've been able to engage in deep state popular support is when they they lied to them when they lied to them about aspects of the cold war, lied to them about the Iraq war, the first Iraq war, lied to them about the second Iraq war. And we've all seen and witness the utter disastrous debacle that is deep state foreign policy for the last century, and especially the last half century, where the net effect has been that, you know,

the Korean War didn't work out, Vietnam War didn't work out, Afghanistan War didn't work out, overthrowing Libya didn't work out, overthrowing Iraq didn't work out, overthrowing Syria didn't work out, overthrowing Syria didn't work out. At what point do we say enough's enough? Enough idiocy. How much death of American soldiers do we need on this Memorial Day before we say enough of deep state power and corruption of America's founding principles, which is based on America first, not getting involved and intertwined and engaged in dumb and stupid wars around the world?

So Trump is going to keep trying to navigate that. You can ignore most of his public statements and just look at it. what Alex did this morning. Read the very end of Trump's truth post. Ignore the rest. That's where Trump is really going on Ukraine is what he says at the end, which is to follow you guys' advice from six months ago, which I think he would have done six months ago,

but for his concerns of deep state power to merit. I think this is all absolutely correct about the truth social post. I mean, I read it. And the way the European media in particular have taken it and distorted it and are reporting it in completely the wrong way. I mean, they're focusing on the first few words and ignoring the main part of it,

which is completely different to what they think. But there's a huge amount that you said there, and I think let's take it first step by step. Firstly, no politician in the United States in the last 30 years, going back to the 60s, has been subjected to the kind of pressures as the Donald Trump has been. I mean, two impeachments,

massive investigations, attempts to kill him, attempts to discredit him, attempts to prosecute him on every kind of absurd, phony charge, and absolutely phony charge. Now, that tells you a great deal about the kind of person

that Donald Trump is, because there is no doubt at all that these attacks are organized and coordinated. I mean, it is impossible that they could be otherwise. If you think that they are not organized at some level, you do not know how politics works. That is the first thing to say. I mean, that's absolutely clear and obvious, at least to me.

The second is contrast what I would say his core supporters are saying. Go and read and listen to someone like Marjorie Taylor. agree. Now, I think, I don't know how interesting you find it. I find a most interesting politician, far more sophisticated and understanding of politics and of political currents in the United States than the Europeans understand. The Europeans do not take her seriously. I think she should be taken extremely seriously. Go and read what journals like the Federal is, which I always read by the way. I read it every day. Again, I find it a most interesting media outlet. Go and go to Robert's programs, you know, your own programs. You could get a very, very good sense of what is being said

and discussed, you know, amongst people like that. And it's on the one and very different from what you would be led to think if you took your views about Trump's electoral base. from the European media, the American mainstream media, the various commentariats, the political leaders in the West, and all of those sort of people. Just actually read them and see what they're saying. And I think you're going to completely different image and sense of what these people are really about.

It's exactly what Robert has been saying, that they don't want to involve the United States in more war, there is a very powerful, very well-argued and coherent peace today, for example, was it maybe yesterday I read it, in the Federalist saying that the United States absolutely does not need war with Iran. I mean, they don't, they may not like Iran, they may not be sympathetic to Iran, but they say, you know, this is not America's business. It's only going to cause us more trouble, more death, destruction, more loss of money, resources, diversion from all the things that the United States needs to do and which it is truly and actually about. So if you understand the base of the political

leader, you'll be able to understand a lot more things about him. And remember, Trump and his base, I accept that Donald Trump is himself, but there is a strong connection between the two. I mean, the one has brought about the other, and there's no doubt at all that, you know, he's created a huge resonance. Now, about JD Vance, I would say that I find him the most impressive, one of the most impressive political leaders in the world at the moment.

If we were to get a JD Vance presidency, I would be extremely excited. I hope we do. And certainly, I do get the sense that he is, somebody who thinks very deeply and very hard, and he does something which is completely unique in foreign policy terms, he actually looks at the facts.

He actually goes out there, researches them. I mean, you know, the Lindsay Graves and all of those people, they don't really wrestle with facts. They lead the United States into wars without actually studying in advance the adversary, the country that they're taking on, the actual interests of the United States, they don't seem to be interested in any of those things.

And they always proceed from a assumption of infinite power that they can bring to bear on any problem, which by itself guarantees success. That's a mystical point of view. It is not a fact-based one. Now, about Lindsay Graham, I've actually been looking into him, and I've had some rather interesting emails about him. People who provide me some discussions and provide him with some explanations of where his support comes from,

the fact that he's backed by people that certain old families in Charleston, which I find interesting, that there is a very, very substantial presence of, of the military industrial complex in his state, that he's deeply connected to all of that. You get a sense of a politician who is at the center of a nexus of power that is both extremely strong in his state itself and which he represents, but also which extends across the whole of the rest

of the United States. So all of the things that Robert has been saying if you actually spend time looking into them, and it does take time, you begin to see how it all comes together and all fits together. There is one thing that I personally, as a person who used to work in the High Court in London, am profoundly shocked by and would never have imagined. And that is the way in which a large section of the legal world, the legal community, the judicial system, the law enforcement system, appears to have been taken over by all of this. Now, I don't mean here the FBI, because about the FBI, I never assumed otherwise.

As far as I'm concerned, the FBI is better understood as an intelligence agency than anything else, basically. But the judiciary of the United States has astonished me. and look at the way in which Donald Trump, he makes orders, which, you know, as far as I can see, they're well within the scope of presidential prerogatives. And we have a judge, a federal judge in some state, and he makes orders, and he says these decisions of Trump's, these actions of Trump, are suspended across the entire territory, not the United States. I have to say, I just cannot get my head around that at all. It is so different from the concept of judicial review, which is, I presume, what this is, that I am used to and familiar with in England. That, I mean, to talk about judicial overreach here, I mean, it is, well, I mean, words, those words don't adequately convey the extent of it. But to repeat again, it is clearly organized.

You cannot imagine this happening to the extent that it is happening unless there is a purpose behind it. And the purpose is clearly to stop this movement that Donald Trump represents and his administration in its tracks. Now, I do would like some explanations as to how this has come about within the federal justice system of the United States. States because I just cannot fathom how judicial review, even in a constitutional system like the American one, can have evolved to this point. It absolutely does not happen in England. I used to work very, very closely with the administrative court in England, which is the court that deals with judicial review. I know judicial review in the English terms backwards. I know it's history and how it evolved down to the prerogative orders, which I presume is, to some extent at least, is history in the

United States as well. And as I said, I just cannot understand how judges are able to, on incredibly thin argumentation, make orders of this kind, stopping the president of the United States, the elected president of the United States, in his tracks for months at the time with just a flick of the 10. So over to you, Robert. Yeah, briefly on Lindsey Graham, the, like somebody wondering, okay, why does it just take action? It's because when he's taken even little bits of actions, he's got massive blowback. The power of Lindsey Graham is that, is in the Senate. He, Tom Tillis and Mitch McConnell can combine to block Trump's nominees, can to block Trump's budget, to block Trump's tariffs, to block anything Trump wants to do on any aspects of the

domestic policy. Now, he has counter leverage. Two of those three, well, all three may be gone by 26. Mitch McConnell is retiring. Of the other two, Lindsey Graham's up for reelection in 2026. Tom Tillis, North Carolina, is up for reelection in 2026. You're absolutely right. South Carolina has a lot of deep state power, a lot of Boeing, a lot of military, industrial complex contractors, and the rest. But what shocked Graham and others was the 2016 primary results, that the assumption was that if Trump went into South Carolina and called out George W. Bush to Jeff Bush's face in front of the whole world on the Iraq war being a disaster and maybe his father's, maybe his brother should have been impeached over it. The assumption was there'll be a massive

blowback because people like Graham really thought their positions were popular in the state representing old school military conservatism. But the reality of military conservatism in the United States is it's mostly an anomaly of the Cold War that America's politics go back and Who voted against NATO? Senator Robert Taft, representing Midwestern populist republicanism from the same state. Now, J.D. Vance represents in Ohio. Go back to 1964, who votes against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution? It's a conservative Republican from eastern Kentucky. That's where historically, the anti-war tendency, opposition to a standing army, was, you know, back to my ancestors at the time of the American Revolution. That the opposed originally, the original constitutional government because it didn't have a bill of rights yet. tax to it. They had to promise that to get it through. So that's the longer political tradition

that's been buried. I mean, I think the deep state was done a big favor by the left hijacking the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. And what that did is it allowed the deep state to demonize anti-war politics as pro-communist politics as anti-American politics. Waybeth Buckley was part of this with the John Byrd Society going all the way back, where he basically gate the conservative movement to purge it of its populist traditions. I mean, this is what George W. Bush says. Edmine says he's against isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. This was the establishment Republican view, but it is divorced from Republican history. And as Republican consultants found out in 2016, it's divorced from the modern Republican Party.

You're right. The modern Republican Party is much better represented by Marjorie Taylor Green than Lindsay Grant. For others out there, if you want to get a real sense of the zeitgeist of what's happening in the populist base in America, I recommend that they follow someone they may think of as an esoteric conspiracy theorist, but 90% of his policy and politics he talks about is everyday politics, and that's Alex Jones. For those are wondering people, that was some kind of weird symbol. This is Info Wars bug for Alex Joke. Alex has been one of the, he is the best representative and the most popular. Look at wide range of independent media surveys.

More than 10% of Americans follow him on a day-to-day basis. This is the guy that Trump went and appeared on because he recognized his significance and consequence. And he's been one of the big, he's pro Ed Snowden, he's pro Julian Assange, he's anti-war, he's anti-deep state, anti-surveillance state, and he's had these positions consistently for two decades. And he's the most popular conservative podcaster or talk show host in the country, you know, now that with the passing of Rush Limbaugh. And so that gives you, and Marjorie Taylor Green, you know,

the order number one source of information is on a regular basis, it's Alex Joe. So the, that represent, I mean, there tends to be this caricature of America, ordinary people, as being some sort of bloodthirsty empire ravaging around the world. And, you know, it's an old left narrative that just is belied by the actual history if you study it. And if someone has the perception of Trump as he's just an imperial colonialist and want to put Trump hotels around the world, you're not going to be able to adequately or accurately predict what he's going to do in policy and politics. So now Trump's leverage on Tillus and on, he has none on McConnell, unfortunately.

I had advised people that McConnell's involved in a lot of crime, his wife is involved in a lot of crime, his old family is connected to various money laundering activities and other activities that a way to maybe remind McConnell is to take a page out of Putin's books or others that, you know, Putin goes to the oligarchs in 2000s and says, look, you can keep your real gotten gains. You're only going to pay a small amount of tax, but keep your head down politically and stop intervening, stop stealing and stop interfering in Russian politics. And you'll be okay. A few didn't get the message. So they got an extended vacation to Siberia. the rest did some fled to britain and other places where they got to hang out and hide out and the like but the uh including bill browder totally corrupt actor and all the rest i mean he gave me an idea of how fake dan van gino was he thought bill browder was a legit guy if you think that you're too clueless to work in the fbi just are uh but putting that aside the other great obstacle trump faces is as you point out is the sort of economic globalist that that's the other deep state is the biggest obstacle to him getting success in terms of minimizing war abroad, which for Trump in part, even if you don't accept my assumption based on a long history of studying Trump

and knowing him about his peace nick proclivities, let's just put it down to money. Trump sees war as costing money. He doesn't see war as profiting. He sees it as very rare. At least he's honest about it. He's like, hey, if we're actually going to do a war, at least get the oil, steal the oil. It's always funny. I always so blunt about that. but about what these wars are really about in some cases. But he just sees his money wasting. He sees foreign aid as money wasted. He sees all this crap per sending to Ukraine is money wasted.

He did the minerals deal so he could have a sellable package coming back because otherwise he thinks it's all a waste of money. Though I don't think he thinks that has any teeth or roots to it long term. If you look at Trump's sort of broad global policy agenda, and I think it's the best way to filter. If you hear Trump say something about anything, because you might hear one thing, one day, another thing, another thing, over here.

Trump is posturing. for leverage. But the leverage he's trying to create, sometimes is with the people he's negotiating with, sometimes as with dealing with domestic constituencies, whether it's his own voter base or dealing with the deep state. And that's where he's doing like his statement yesterday was a combination of that, a hybrid of that. Okay, I'm going to criticize Putin to satisfy the deep state. I'm going to criticize Zelensky to satisfy my base. But you look at the very end and you figure out what he's actually up to. He's planning what J.D. Vance let the cat out of the bag a couple of weeks ago in a Fox interview that the media buried because I didn't see it

until one of our board members shared it with me where Van said we're going to get out if it doesn't work we're going to get out which by the way is Vance's general view van says an old school American view that Europe is a problem Europe is a burden Europe is an obstacle Europe is a trap same view that Senator Taft had said don't join NATO and that was at the peak of the beginning of the Cold War we have no more Cold War rationale for NATO's existence Trump in 2016 16 said, well, we'll get out of NATO. That in Trump's instinctually is on that same side, though he doesn't intellectualize the issues in the same way that Vance does. But the economic globalists are the other obstacle he faces, and their main power is economic. So sometimes the economic globalist and the

deep state warmongers are aligned. Sometimes they're not. To give an example on China, they can actually be divorced. There's aspects of the deep state that want a kinetic war, kinetic conflict with China, that want China to be the subordinate, submissive factory worker to the world. And whereas you have some on the economic globalist side that see kinetic conflict as a problem, as a hurdle to globalism, as a hindrance to globalism, though they have an economic globalist perspective. So like Jeffrey Sachs generally comes from the economic globalist school, but he sees kinetic conflict as a hindrance rather than a help to that. And so, you know, Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard-trained economist was very involved in the sort of,

He's a very big proponent of the IMF, international monetary fund, the World Bank, those kind of institutions involved in Bolivia, shock therapy was one of his ideas in Bolivia in Poland. And then rather famously or infamously, depending on your perspective, they tried it in Russia. Russians still are bitter about shock therapy, kind of discredited on a global stage. But economic globalism, he fundamentally supports. He believes that trade benefits everybody, no matter what, that benefits both. sides no matter what. And thinks economic globalism will bring more peace and more prosperity.

I disagree with about that. That's why Sachs is aligned with Soros. Soros funds a lot of his foundations and think things. And so he has a very different perspective on China than the Vance Trump populist wing of the Republican Party does. But the economic globalist have profited immensely from this structure. Now, it's only a small percentage. Like you look at what economic globalism has done, under the working classes of the West, and it is utterly devastated the working classes of the West, no matter how you measure it. That's why you're seeing Brexit and Reform Party surge in the UK. It's why you're seeing Le Pen go from being a southern French movement to a northeastern mining town French movement. That's why you're seeing aspects of it through central, eastern and southern Europe,

combined with cultural conservatism in some of those countries that don't like the wokeism or open borders, like in Poland, like in Hungary, like in Italy. But the economic globalism is its failures to deliver to America's working class and the working classes of the West is why you're seeing these mass protests against institutions like the EU or bad trade policies as they see it inflicting such economic harm on it. And to put it in real terms, their wages have gone down, their incomes have gone down, their pensions have gone down. Housing and healthcare and education is more unaffordable and accessible for them than it has ever been.

levels, if you look at young working class men, the biggest group trending towards Trump between 2012 and 2024, often minority, often African American, Hispanic or Asian, but that they're millennial and zoomer generation. And why are they searching it? Well, look at the underlying data. Their economic well-being, their material foundation of their communities have been ripped apart. This is where J.D. Vance comes from a more communitarian tradition of that respect. He's not a pure free market guy. He doesn't think of a free market that leads a community to be devastated. is not going to have a happy ending to Hillbilly Elligy. And so from that, their perspective, they believe that they want to overthrow the entire

globalist order, deep state foreign policy and economic globalist worldwide. That is a revolution. There was no way it was going to happen easily or quickly. And in the U.S., we have institutional obstacles. And those institutional obstacles are representative branch that's unrepresentative. unlike when you win, say, with a parliamentary system, you might have a lot more control over your own representatives. The President of the United States does not, because they're independently elected. They're not as dependent upon him for their elections in the first place.

And they are to a degree, but not to the same degree. And so there's the same party discipline that Trump can impose. So people like Graham can hold them up on things in the Senate. Other members can hold them up on things in the House. And then you have the bureaucracy that can just sabotage and sabotage and sabotage. And here in the U.S., they've decided they're permanently entitled to those positions, that they're not only immune from elections, they're immune from those officials. They get elected in those elections so much so that you, even though we have a federal

service, merit board, you're supposed to go through a court of claims. If you have a contract dispute, you're supposed to go through. When Trump, like you look at USA, that was fantastic. I mean, the finally taking apart the money tree that is the financial. source of this economic globalist deep state war agenda is USA, does NED, these, you know, aligned with their nongovernmental organizations? You know, people always want, you know, why does some foreign country ban non-governmental organizations? Because of non-governmental organizations aren't really non-governmental. They're aligned with these deep state institutional

interests, whether globalist or war or war-hor oriented, into perpetrating it around the world and using federal taxpayer funds to facilitate it. The, but, What happens when he tries to take it apart? All the agencies go nuts. Congress threatens investigations. And their biggest ally institutionally right now is the court system, is the American federal judiciary. And it was a good book written a couple years ago about the professional managerial

class and how you could probably blame almost all the world's problems over the last century over the rise of a professional managerial class in power. Fascism, communism, neoliberal corporatism, whatever you want to, whatever ideological reference point, you want to make you often find a professional managerial class giving power to itself it's always some excuse for power to itself it's like our welfare policies are not let's help poor people it's let's hire a bureaucrat in the name of helping poor people this is why so much of the foreign aid that comes from the united states uh less than 10 cents on a dollar actually goes to wherever it is supposed to go in the first play so linsky accidentally let let this out he's like you know a lot of the money doesn't really

come to us no duh dim wit but that's what you're there for you're there for to be the poster boy so they can drag in a bunch of cash for their pals and allies in places like Arlington, Virginia, more than than Kiev of Ukraine. And so that's the scam, but the people now protecting that scam are the federal judicial bridge. And they represent the biases and prejudices and parochialisms of the professional managerial class. America's founders, the anti-federalists, for example, who opposed the constitutional change from the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution, one of their main objections was the creation of a federal judicial branch. And they said the problem is this will become an aristocratic branch of government.

And every aristocratic branch of government in history has ended up becoming an oligarchy, almost without fail. It's been interesting watching Putin try to experiment with an American-style legal system, but you've seen some hesitance. Like he likes aspects of it, but distrust other aspects of it. And this is why. And for the kind of criticism that the courts came in under, you can go no further than President Thomas Jefferson,

who hated what the federal judiciary was becoming, and in order to try to tame them, impeached the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase, and almost got him removed. But it sent a message to the federal courts, hey, back off being so openly political. But he would spend the next two decades warning about the dangers of the federal judicial branch.

The next man to do it was President Andrew Jackson, who famously told the Supreme Court, well, Chief Justin made his ruling, now he can go enforce it. and then he would have conflicts with him both over Indian removal and on the second bank of the United States, the latter being the bigger constitutional confrontation potentially, because he said it was unconstitutional. The court said it was. He said, I don't care.

We're disbanded it. Then you had Abraham Lincoln. And Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus before Congress had authorized it. The Constitution authorized it in case of invasion or insurrection. And the courts tried to stop him from doing it. He didn't care. He did it anyway. And had very negative things to say about the federal judicial.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, you know, the four horsemen are going to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse, referring to those four anti-new deal judges that were leading the Supreme Court to strike down every form of reform legislation to protect labor or others. And he said, well, you know, you guys seem really busy up there. I'm going to help you out. I'm going to add, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, however many more we need. And all of a sudden they got the message and backed off. But so the, but now we're seeing the ultimate judicial coup of the Americans election. I mean, you're seeing little glimpses of it around the world. Like you see it in the Romanian courts deciding who can and can rent for office as directed by the EU.

You see it occasionally with the EU court making rulings as to Hungary and trying to intervene in their politics and undermine Orban, who is still Trump. And that's another way to understand Trump. Who's his best friend in Europe? It's Orban. That gives you an idea of what he really think. Maloney is trying to replace Orban. It's not going to work. She's going to kiss up well.

But she's not Orban because Orban ideologically and intellectually shares the same assumptions and presumptions of Trump at. I try to warn a lot of the Trump people. The federal judiciary is going to wage war on it. But the fact that they, I mean, they've done in every capacity. They've told him who he can hire and who he can fire. They've told him what money can go out and money when he can't. I mean, they're actually saying he has to keep giving money to these bogus NGOs, that he keeps spending money on this ridiculous radio free America and radio free Europe.

I mean, these are deep state apparatus and operations ever since their inception and origination. Now, Kerry Lake is a very much populist reformer on the Trump team. team, what does she do? She's like, we're going to redo all this. We're going to take away all this. We're not going to give money to all your Democratic pals and allies and deep state pals and allies. And we're going to restructure this to actually make it about news rather than me and portray America in a positive light, but not be involved in all this other shenanigans and nonsense. And what does the federal court do? Say, no, no, no, you can't do that. You got to keep our personnel in there, our friends and their allies. Many of these judges have friends and family that are receiving money that they're making rulings on, which is just the most egregious conflict of interest one could imagine. And yet they're, and now the, now I think Trump kind of baited him on this.

If you wanted to red pill the normie American as to how corrosively corrupt and dangerous to constitutional liberty, the federal judiciary has become in America, the best way to get them to do it was to, is to issue inane and insane rulings on immigration. And the most egregious immigration cases, right? It's not like the sweet, you know, little grandma's been here, you know, 30 years and whatever helps out the local household, you know, that isn't who he focused on. He said, let's take the worst, most dangerous illegals that are here. Let's deport them. Let's use traditional remedies, summary deportation, summary removal. Let's use the Alien Enemies Act in these other laws that give direct authority to the president to remove anybody that's illegally present here.

And if you were not legally present here to begin with, your only due process to which you are due is deportation under American constitutional law that goes back more than a century. So the but these courts can't help themselves. They so obsessively hate Trump. And they believe they should run the world. If you think like an EU commissioner, you can understand how these federal judges think in America. The same mindset. You know,

as they stole from Alex, they're all Ursula von der Crazies, you know, across the board. That's all you got. Vinder crazy, Vander Crazy, Vander Crazy, Van der Crazy, Van der Crazy. And you're just begging them not to be crazy today. And so the net effect is they've issued it. Now they're ordering.

they're intervening and interfering in foreign diplomacy. So there were a couple of murderers, rapists, and pedophiles who had long been ordered removed to southern Sudan. There's only a few of them. It wasn't like a huge number. I think it's five or six. We finally get around to removing them. And the federal judiciary kind of takes a political bait

because there's no way this is going to look good for them long term. But a federal judge's up in and it says, nah, you can't remove them to Sudan. And if they're in Sudan, you've got to keep them there, you've got to give them nice room, food, and housing. You have 10 days for this, 20 days for that, 30 days for this, to go to this process, that process. that process, another process.

They're ordering that he take people that have already been removed. They were never legally here that are convicted criminals and dangerous crimes and bring them back here. That the, you know, the TDA, the Venezuelan gang, that the Trump administration's perception is that the veteran former or no, current Venezuelan President Maduro kind of authorized TDA to come to the United States, both to solve Venezuela's internal crime problem on the eve of their election, but also as payback to the United States for, various sanctions policies. That's how they perceive it. You know, there's debates about the accuracy

of that, but that is what the U.S. believes under this administration. So, and these are some of the worst, most violent gang members anywhere. I mean, they just, you know, their method of criminal organization empowerment is to just be more violent than the next guy. You know, if you're even more dangerous, more extreme, more violent, you will be able to gain and obtain power quickly on a rapid basis. And they were throughout large parts of Latin and Central America. But they come to the United States are a perfect target, a political foil, if you will, for Trump. But the courts are coming and say, no, no, no, they got to be here too. I mean, over 60% of the country wants mass deportations, least of all in 80% with deportations of

anybody that's been ordered removed that has a criminal record of any seriousness. Not like a traffic ticket or anything like that, but, you know, serious crimes, domestic violence, battery, assault, robbery, rape, murder, etc. Gang member affiliation, you name it. And they're intervening in all of that, interfering in all of that. And the only question is, does the Supreme Court in the next several weeks pull back from the cliff that they are on of a constitutional confrontation. I don't consider a constitutional crisis because the Constitution gives this power to the president, as the courts themselves have acknowledged for more than a century. It's a constitutional confrontation of a federal judiciary

that thinks it knows best. And the American people are wrong. And it's like the Romanian court that said, nah, you can't pick who you want for president. It's like the EU court saying, no, we're going to decide and dictate what your domestic policy is going to be against the will of your domestic population. And it's just on. steroids and on scale because it's the United States of America and it's the federal judiciary. And either the Supreme Court's going to step in and hem in these excesses. They might say no more nationwide injunctions. They might say no more injunctions other than the parties of the case. They might say no more injunctions to punitive classes until an actual class

exists. So they have contradicted that themselves in recent rulings. And if they don't, then there's going to be a direct constitutional confrontation. At some point, Trump will not endanger the safety of the country in the name of the federal judicial branch. So if he is forced and obloat, he is affording them. Some would say enough rope to hang themselves. Others would say enough rope to fix the problem. But it's going to be up to the Supreme Court and most likely Chief Justice Roberts, because unfortunately, as I predicted, Judge Amy, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was going to be a complete traitor.

This is what happens when you let the Southern aristocracy run things. So you pointed out, Alexander, Lindsay Graham's ties go back to the Southern aristocracy around Charleston. This is an old slave holding would-be cast of people that think they should run the world and they know better than the rest of us. The same mindset in North Carolina, it was Republicans that portrayed the black Trump supporter, Mark Robinson, who was running for governor there. They were the ones who leaked it to the media in the Democratic Party in order to sabotage because they didn't want to be governed by a black populace. I mean, that old southern aristocracy used to dominate the Republican Party in the Bush era. It doesn't now. They've been overthrown.

Trump has overthrown them. They just don't realize it yet. And what you have is a bunch of aristocratic elites represented in the judicial branch, bureaucratic branch, think tanks academia, like Harvard, who thinks they're just above the law and all the rules, they can violate everything and be held immune because they think they are the beacon of American representation. When the ordinary American sees them as a bunch of elite out-of-touch knobs that want to impose their foreign values on the rest of us, and they're often working against the interest of America.

Most Americans don't know almost half of students at U.S. universities in the Ivy League come from foreign nations. I mean, G, felt so comfortable with Harvard. He sent his own daughter there. So, you know, that's not exactly America first Harvard. No one really confused Harvard, America, Berkeley, about it. So I think we're going to, so fighting these, the economic globalist on the one hand, that's what it's tariff and trade and industrial policies about, and fighting the deep state on global war policy,

will be his two principle and primary obstacles because he has the support of the American people. He has good policies and ideas, as the American people see. see it, but he's going to have to get the federal judiciary to stop blocking his immigration plans and his policy and personnel changes. It's going to have to get Congress to back off Lindsey Graham to back off extortionate threats in order to get through Ukraine, which I think they mapped out ahead of time, the same conclusion that you came to six months ago, which was, I think Trump advanced, which was that the only way to exit Ukraine is to exit Ukraine. But the only way to exit Ukraine is to build up enough support so that the, you know,

they would be saboteurs don't have the means and the method to be able to undermine him when he doesn't. I mean, like yesterday's announcement was almost a perfect announcement of that. I only cared about what he said at the end. Like, saying Putin was crazy. I don't know. Ukraine tried to murder him until he said, payback. Hey, here's a little hello in Kiev. I mean, Trump would have gone down, would have done twice as much as what Putin did.

So, I mean, but I was like, I don't think Trump really believes that at some level. The, is he wants out. And he thinks doing the way to get out. is to build enough of a narrative of, golly, gee, I really tried. And I was really fair. And I was hostile. I was harsh and tough on both sides and see, golly gee, even though it just didn't work out. So the, but on the trade policy, he is absolutely sincere, which apparently the EU and the European leaders are still befuddled by Trump.

The, you know, Kellogg, by the way, that same America First Policy Institute that's creating so many problems in the Trump administration. Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, who's underdelivered from that institute, helped found him. it. The cash Patel was employed by them, a sign that maybe he wasn't going to deliver on his big words. The Pam Bondi, Attorney General, also associated with him. Probably another sign she wasn't going to deliver. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, deep state swamp character going back decades, big lobbyist of a lot of people, a very good disciplinarian, no doubt about that, but also not trustworthy, unpopular positions. But last but not least, the lead foreign military advisor for the America of First Policy Institute is the one and only don't, you know, don't buy this at the store,

Kellogg. So I can't believe he really believes in Kellogg. The guy is the kind of idiot that Trump would be fun of by the scenes. And I hope that Kellogg was just there to sucker the Europeans and the neocons and deep state apparatus in the U.S. and the thinking maybe Trump would continue the Ukrainian conflict, but stepping back from it, looking at this global set of policies. And the best way to filter Trump is, okay, who is he, trying to leverage by this public statement.

But the second filter I use to try to figure out what Trump is up to. And I recommend the people watch these interview with Joe Rogan. That was one of his most revelatory, most open, open, honest, and transparent. Rogan asked him, how are you going to get peace in Ukraine? He's like, well, I would never tell you that. I would never tell anybody that. And what he's saying is nothing I say publicly is actually necessarily my position. It's purely for posturing, purely for leverage in these issues.

But if you look at what his global interest are, his broad scale foreign policy, he needs the cost of living down. Number one issue that he got elected on was the cost of living. He sees the number one input cost to the cost of living as energy. That's part one. Part two, this is an underappreciated aspect of Trump. But you can find some interviews over time where he talks about what is Uncle John Trump, who is a famous scientist at MIT, that the government hired to go in and look at Tesla's documents to see if Tesla's inventions had validity on a go-forward basis from a national security perspective.

He talks about how his uncle John repeatedly emphasized the incredible danger of nuclear war. And so Trump's actually been obsessed with it in his own way. This will come out in honest, transparent, and just little bits and pieces, if you watch them and study them over time. But nuclear non-proliferation is a real objective that Trump has globally. And then in part 30 is restructuring global economics to focus on national interest, not globalist interest

and to put America's working, and to put the working class, in this case, America first, rather than global economic financial capital interest. In that, if you look at those three, his two big groups of opposition will be economic globalists. We have a lot of money in the equity markets, a lot of money in the stock markets, a lot of money in asset markets,

a lot of money in real estate markets, particularly in the West, even though it's creating a disaster, housing bubble, unaffordability in Canada, housing bubble, unaffordability in Britain, housing in accessibility, unaffordability, and bubble in Australia. Same thing is happening in the United States. Our housing market is frozen because housing prices have doubled. It's the highest percentage of median income in the history of the United States. This is unsustainable. But there are people who made a lot of money on it, and they can use that money to sink markets the moment he tries to deviate from the things that have made them, fantastically and fabulously rich. But Trump is sincere, absolutely, on a trade tariff industrial policy in the sort of Kevin Phillips school thought. His perception is, I will get to that in a bit. But if you look at those three priorities, that tells you how he's most likely to interact

with Russia and Putin. He needs Putin and Russia as an ally to keep oil prices down. He needs Putin and Russia as an ally to get nuclear nonproliferation, biggest nuclear power in the world is Russia, not the United States. And on the restructuring economics on trade, Russia is not an adversary at all. Russia can even be an ally. Russia, he doesn't see Russia stealing American jobs. So he could see China is doing so. But Russia could be an ally in regards to that as opposed to an adversary, a critical adversary potential. Because his global trade policy isn't just China. It's to replace China in everybody else's markets.

So it's bifurcated to restore and re onshore American manufacturing and industry, which he believes is essential not only to national security, but long-term economic prosperity for working class people and populations. And in that regard, he has the same view as, say, President McKinley or our founders, you know, people like Alexander Hamilton, who believe in industrial policy and so forth. But that's why I think it's very unlikely we ever get serious sanctions against Russia. If you ever see them announced, Trump will find 100 ways now 100 loopholes in it, so it's not really meaningful.

But it's why he's very unlikely to get further dragged down into a Ukrainian conflict. And why it's unlikely he'll have any permanent opposition to Russia and Putin because he needs him for his primary objectives in foreign policy, which is mostly, as you point out, about domestic policy. Yeah. Lots of things to say. Let us start with that true social post because I think, you know, getting to understand why Trump wrote it at all,

in fact explains it. So the Russians launch a combined drone and missile strike in Kiev. Zelensky, Churchill, as he now has practically become here in Britain, complains, starts complaining

that the Americans are silent about this. So when Zelensky talks about this, you can be absolutely sure that he's been told to say this and you can imagine immediately that the phone lines are buzzing and they're calling Washington and they're calling their friends in Washington

and they're saying, why isn't Trump coming out and speaking out against this missile attack? I mean, is it a sign that he's basically on Putin's side? So you can see the pressure and you can imagine the pressure. So what Trump does is he writes a true social post in which he says, you know, this, this, this, this, missile strike, really isn't good at all, shows that, you know, Putin is off his mind.

And then he goes on and says a whole lot of other things about Zelensky. And then he ends by saying, this isn't my war. In fact, whenever Trump talks about Ukraine, the one line that he constantly repeats, and by the way, it's something that, you know, Alex Christopher said he should do months and months ago. The one line he constantly repeats is, this is not my war. It's Putin's war maybe. It's Zelensky's war.

It's Joe Biden's war. It's absolutely not my war. This was a post, a message that he had to put out on true social. It was a piece of political management. And that is all it is. You can see exactly how it came about. You can see exactly the pressure

that was exerted on him. It was all over the media here in Europe. It was all over with, comments from European governments and European officials. They put the pressure on the White House and Trump stopped it by just putting out this truth social post, which ultimately doesn't mean very much. I said, it's six of one, half a dozen at the other, but it's not my war at the end of the way. I want to get us out. So that's the first thing to say. Now, the other thing about Lindsay Graham, and this is a point about the whole sanctions package that he's putting forward,

as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not new to politics. I had to deal with politics quite a lot, and I saw how these things are done in London as well. This is all about putting pressure on Donald Trump. That's what it really is. It's not scaring Putin. This sanctions package isn't going to scare or intimidate or influenced on Putin. It's basically a show of force. against Donald Trump, telling him, look, you know, there's 81 senators. I don't believe that, by the way. I don't believe there's 81 senators who really firmly signed up for this thing. There's 81 senators more than enough to impeach you who want us to remain fully committed

100% behind Ukraine. And, you know, you go against us at your peril because, you know, if, you're If you don't do, as we say, well, we can always activate the sanctions package, and then, you know, you'll be in all kinds of trouble. And if you go against us, we won't start to pass your laws or nominate your people and we might confirm your people, rather. And then we might go off and do even more things that you won't like. And ultimately, we could impeach you. I don't believe this package has the remotest chance of getting through. I don't think it would get through, I mean, I don't think you'd get through Congress.

I think if Trump actually opposed it straightforwardly, I think you'd see a lot of the support for it peel away. And it goes completely against Trump's current economic policy. I mean, it is completely at odds with it, which at the moment he's trying to reopen trade with China. He's trying, as you correctly say, to keep oil prices down. It makes no sense in those terms. So that's what I would say about. Now, about globalisation and financialisation and free markets and the whole school of economics that we have today, in my opinion, all of that originated in Europe in the 1960s. It was very much a product of the evolution of the financial markets in Europe at that time, more before the United States.

I remember people talking about Euro dollars and things of that kind, for example, than trading in Euro dollars, and talking about, you know, all these, you know, restrictions that we should be allowed to trade absolutely freely and do away with exchange controls that we had in Europe, which were very much a part of the Bretton board system. And it was also very much part of integrating the European economies and bringing them all together and creating converting the European economic community, which probably always had elements of this into the thing that we see today. And, you know, that was what the WEF was all about, which is all about ultimately integrating European economies and lifting restrictions on trade and making

it possible to move money from one part of Europe to another part of Europe. And ultimately, taking that whole package and making it global, which is what they started to do when they started to call it, you know, the double the world economic forum. I always forget what its original name was. But when it was set up in the 60s, it was all about Europe. It was the European Economic Forum or something of that kind. So that's, that's as far as I'm concerned, what globalization was all about. And who were behind it? old European money, as I never cease to point out, if you see the original people who set it out. That was why it all happened in Davos.

That's where all these people went skiing. That's where they met each other. That's where they decided, well, it wouldn't be a nice thing to meet in Davos and to talk about these things, you know, between the skiing and the Afro ski and all of that. And it's, you know, the old, money, political, aristocracy that's been in Europe and who've been running things in Europe ever since.

And here I just want to say, just as a quick aside, a thing that people in Europe and especially in my own country, Britain, always get wrong, which is the conservatism in the United States and conservatism in, say, Britain, are actually profoundly different things. In the United States, conservatism is very much connected to the political system, to the Constitution, which is a founding document of the United States to a great extent. Not entirely, but to a great extent. It's all about the constitutional political order of the United States, whereas in Europe and in Britain, it is all about preserving the hegemony of, of the aristocratic traditional political class, which by the way in Britain was also the imperial class. So you can already see the difference. So somebody can be deeply conservative in the United States,

or at least say that they're conservative in the United States, but their conservatism is connected to the proper operation of the Constitution. and the American political tradition, whereas there is nothing analogous like that in Europe. And in Europe, it's more about keeping the people who have always been in wealth and power there where they still exercise wealth and power.

So they are very, very different things. The more I've worked in this area, you know, discussion and commentary, the more I've got to understand the United States. States, I mean, and I don't pretend to understand the United States fully and completely well. The more I understand and see the differences between my country, Britain and the United States. And this is also true about what conservatism is. Now, what happened in the United States in the 1950s, starting from the 1950s, is that a strand of American conservatism became European-inized.

and you can see that very closely with some of the people. I mean, Robert mentioned William Buckley. William Buckley was deeply involved in European affairs. He, I mean, spoke European languages. His father who had created the 14th for a long time based in Europe. I think William Buckley was partly educated in Europe, for example. And the whole National Review thing basically is all about that. And if you read the National Review to this day,

you see you see this still it's very much the same sort of conservatism you would get from reading the daily telegraph in london for example very different entirely from the kind of conservatism that someone like marjorie taylor green whom i was talking about previously uh represents now going back to the whole economic issues the whole trade policy issues i'm just going to say one thing here, which is myself having once studied this whole subject long ago,

which is that there is a massive body of economic thought, mostly American, by the way, mostly created in the 19th and early 20th century,

which looks into all of these questions, looks into protectionism and protectionism, by the way, was only a part of what used to be called the American system, the whole way of creating the economy of the United States, which is all about, by the way, giving labor high wages so that labor then became not just the producers, but also the consumers as well.

And it was all profoundly Republican. It was all connected very much with the United States as a republic, and a republic, you know, which was based on a, prosperous, self-confidence citizenry. So all of these things were woven together in a very powerful way. Now, I am not sure to what extent people in Donald Trump's circle, people like J.D. Vance are familiar with this, and it might be useful to them if they went back and started to read it.

This body of economic thought that developed in the United States, which was, by the way, antagonistic to economic thinking in Britain at that time, which is all about free trade and laissez-faire and all of those kind of things. That was not American at all. The Americans, as I said, were deeply antagonistic to it. I don't hear very much spoken about it, but it did have influence in Europe in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century. and in the early 20th century as well.

So, you know, it's something that's there. It's waiting to be looked at. It's, I think, been massively neglected. It fell into eclipse after the Second World War. There were still residual elements of it still active in America in the 1950s. Basically, it ended its influence in the US in economic school. in the 1960s. But I think it would be quite interesting

to go back and look and understand what they say. And I think if you did that, it might actually help to provide an intellectual underpinning to the kind of program that one senses the people like J.D. Vance especially.

And Donald Trump too are interested in pursuing in the United States today. Now, about... the role of the judiciary, I have to also say again that this is very like the European judiciary, just to say this, because of course in Europe and to a great extent even in Britain, the separation of powers concept was something that some intellectuals came up with in Europe in the late 17th and 18th century.

But it was never properly applied in Europe, and in Britain it was never applied at all. The judiciary, in theory, are the king's judges in England. They sit as, they actually don't sit as representatives of the king. When they sit on their thrones in an English courtroom, they are the king. That's why they sit on a throne. They have the royal courts of arms behind them. That's why we bow to them when we enter the courtroom. they are there speaking the king's voice and enforcing the king's law.

And we have something like that right across Europe in more different ways in much of Europe. The judiciary are essentially an administrative arm of the state that is profoundly true in France, which is the legal system that I know best, by the way. I interconnected quite heavily at one time with French lawyers and with French courts. So I think to some extent what we're seeing in the United States is something of the same thing happening with the judiciary there. They are becoming part of an administrative state, which is, of course, again, completely contrary to the American tradition, which saw judges and courts in a profoundly different way. And Robert spoke about the fact that, you know, Abraham Lincoln exercised his powers as president in ways that the courts didn't like.

It's always worth remembering that Lincoln was a lawyer. I am sure Robert will agree with me when you read his speeches. For me, they read very often like legal arguments. This is a man steeped in the law. And of course he was also in some ways conservative. He was conservative in the fact that he rooted everything that he did in his own interpretation of the Constitution, which I will accept many, many, many Americans at the time didn't agree with him. But he still looked always back to the Constitution and tried to justify his every action in terms of the Constitution.

in a way that no European leader would ever, ever conceivably do. Because in Europe, we have nothing, nothing that resembles the Constitution of the United States. So that's what I wanted to say. Absolutely. I mean, speaking at that point, when I clerked for a Native American tribe, a Ho Chung tribal Wisconsin, that was setting up its own tribal court system that was designed to interface with non-tribal members, but it was trying to create something that would be credible to both,

non-tribal members and tribal members. They couldn't get tribal members to partake or participate, that they chose instead the tribal elders. In part, it was recognition of tradition. But the other thing was fascinating. Something I never even thought about was they had borrowed the American tradition of having the court elevated above everybody else and of wearing robes. And the tribal members would come in and they'd be like,

what the heck is this? What are you doing up there? We'd do that robe on. And I was like, fascinating. It was a true democratizing reminder. that you're right, these judicial traditions in America come from royal elites. And then you go further back politically, the old eastern establishment was notoriously anglophile. Council of Foreign Relations notoriously anglophile.

The founders of the CIA and the NSA deeply enmesh with MI6 and Brits. I mean, they saw that each other as the perfect, you know, the waspish gentleman, the Lawrence of Arabia. It's going to free the Arab world, all that kind of thing. And that's very much their mindset. And it's also a good reminder of America's populist tradition. is directly contrary to it, directly adversarial to it. Thomas Jefferson was part of the part of the outlier part of the country. Benjamin Franklin notoriously turned on Britain after Britain turned on him in the American Revolution. The Andrew Jackson came from what was then the frontier

of America in Tennessee, my homestead. The Abraham Lincoln was from southern Illinois. The free soil, free labor, free men. That was the movement against abolition. There might have been support from industrialists in the north, but its political support was a very popular. one. Whereas, you know, the Roosevelt's were much more anglofile. That's why they're, you know, Wilson was very anglofile. And what Americans remember is anglophiles get us into dumb wars. Anglophiles undermine our economic self-interest. So the, and you look at Trump advanced. Trump, mother's side of the family, Scottish, old Scottish fishermen, not deeply enmeshed in the English elite. The Jay Vance, Appalachian. You know, it's my favorite ancestral designation in the U.S. census.

They go by and they say, okay, what's your ancestor? And these people get really upset. And I'll be like, what are you talking about? I'm American. You know, I mean, are you English or you're French? You're talking, I'm American. And they'll threaten to shoot the census taker before you can get out of there. So that's the JD Vance tradition with Hillbelly Ellogy.

So both of them come from a skeptical view. They're more, they're not Anglo-phobes, but they're definitely not Anglo-Files. And they lean more in that direction, as they're, does the populist influence in America, which often is heavily German and Irish and Scottish, Scotch Irish in the East Tennessee Hills. So like the Appalachia where he came from historically, Scotch Irish, who often their main adversaries was England,

was the old royal family. So it comes from those political traditions that sort of pass on ancestrally through narratives and stories and political belief structures. So that kind of makes sense in that regard. As to this sort of, you're right, the American policy, the American Mississippi designed in part by Alexander Hamilton, was predicated in part on what Britain initially did,

which was that basically you follow, Kevin Phillips details this in industrial policy and other books, politics of virtue of poor, bad money, other the boiling point, the best political analyst in American history and becomes a very populist informed direction is Kevin Phillips, passed away a few years ago. He famously said, I don't reckon, going to your conservative point, He said, I don't recognize much conservatism in these so-called conservatives. He goes, the American Republicans don't want to conserve anything. They don't want to conserve communities. They don't want to conserve a way of life.

They don't want to conserve a constitutional liberty. They believe in chaotic free markets that are meant to enrich and empower them at the expense of ordinary people because they're really not free markets. It's crony capitalism at heart, corporatism through the state. And that influences their economic policies. So Vance is D is even more pro-tariff than Trump is, if that's, you know, the possible. So like there was some doubts about it's Trump serious about what he's going to do trade-wise with China. I'll get to China in a second.

Or the EU. He's absolutely serious. He's going to run circles around the EU in this. The EU is trying to get us further embedded in the Ukrainian war. At the same time, they want what Trump sees as very unfair trade policy. with the U.S. Both ain't happening for sure. I mean, good luck trying to.

Can you imagine Vander crazy trying to negotiate with Trump? I mean, that's like a dwarf tossing contest. It should be illegal in terms of the disparities of influence and power. So, and negotiating skill and tactics. I mean, oh, my goodness. It is what it is. So I would recommend that there was a decent interview with Robert Leitzinger did, the U.S. trade representative with Tucker Carlson.

Leitzinger and Peter Navarro are the two biggest intellectual influences on Trump's trade policy. Vance is deeply aligned with them. Again, he's even more Trump than Trump on that. And the goal is simple. Leverage the access to the richest consumer market in the world, which is the United States. Leverage it to re-onsure American manufacture. But that's only the first goal. The second goal is to replace the world, China included, in global manufacturing markets.

And the like that's where I mean I think China figured it out It wasn't just about The changing our trade relationship with China It was about changing our trade relationship with the world In part to replace Chinese manufactured goods With U.S. manufactured goods The now there's some part of that That's a national security objective with certain people

With some groups and influences And this reflects sort of broader A Trump policy toward China particularly So China will be his focal point on trade. How it was sold to the Americans at the time we authorized China to enter the World Trade Organization was similar to how they sold NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, nearly 1990s. Trump was opposed to it all the way back. People think maybe Trump originated a lot of these populous themes. You can find it in Pat Buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign.

You can find it in Ross Perrault's independent campaign for the presidency in 1992. Two principles Ross Perrault ran on. One was independence in trade. And the other was no blood for oil. People forget that part. Perrault was a very anti-war tradition. The media just only talked about his budget policies and his unique personality. They didn't want to talk about his two actual most popular policies, which was changing trade policies and rejecting globalism, fundamental.

But the way it pitched was if we bring China into the World Trade Organization and we leverage, and this was part of what Trump speech in Saudi Arabia, was about also recommend people watch vance's speech yesterday or this weekend to the u.s. Naval Academy because he expanded on and further intellectualized the Trump policies which is really going to become vance policies and i think the probability he's the president is very very high 75 80 percent is you're out there in the betting market what i put it on if you want to wait for years to cash in the uh is that the they see china uh in very different than how it was sold to us Americans at the time of the World Trade Organization. What Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pitched was that by leveraging American economic influence

and access to the American consumer markets, it would lead to a flourishing of freedom and liberty in China, so much so that they couldn't wait to buy American goods, and it would be a net good for everybody, net benefit for everybody. It's like the Mearsheimer Sachs difference. Sachs believes trade benefits everybody. Meersheimer says everything's kind of a trade off, at least in terms of power, if not economics. The,

the Trump is more of the Mirschimer school in that regard. In fact, you can find in some of Trump advances speech, not Trump speech, but Vance's speech, at the Enable Academy, you'll find Mearsheimer elements, particularly as he's indirectly referencing China. He even uses the great powers language and all that kind of jazz. So you can see Meersheimer's having some influence on,

on Vance's perceptions of how foreign policy should be used. But the pitch was, there'll be peace and freedom in China. China will become very prosperous. And it'll become like the American system. The Chinese workers will become so wealthy under the Chinese system that they'll now want to buy American goods and will maintain a technological and skill edge in certain products. And that will make us all richer and all better off. What, you know, go forward about a quarter century. What has happened?

None of the political reform that was predicted has ever happened. That that has not happened within China. Chinese Communist Party arguably is more powerful today than it was 25 years ago when all this started. on the flip side, economically, there's one, there's been no explosion in the Chinese consumer market. Chinese still prefer to save and invest rather than spend, despite efforts within the Chinese economy to try to boost its domestic production, consumption, it hasn't been able to do so. And there has been no interest in China. China believed in the American system times 10 economically. They have never opened up their markets in that way because they see that as undermining Chinese security, which has usually been the priority, particularly under Xi, of the Chinese, of the Chinese Communist Party.

Domestic security, number one, economic prosperity, number two, but not the other way around. And so whereas what's happening in the U.S., we have seen our entire communities hollowed out overnight, and more and more economists have come to terms that all their promises and preaching, both as the NAFTA and China and WTO,

but we're wrong. It didn't lead to a boom in American wages. It led to a mass, basically a great depression. Our America's what's called America's heartland, quite literally, kind of like the Midlands in Britain, is now called the Rust Belt for a reason. It's because that's how much damage has been done to America's working class. In fact, you could argue that economic globalism writ large was to find all the places where labor had succeeded in getting a higher share of productivity and taking it away from them by first exporting jobs overseas

and then importing elite immigrants into those countries to do the jobs, to do all the rest of the jobs. so that your ordinary American working class person, like when Trump says make America great again, so people confuse, some sort of like fascistic thing or play. No, it was very simple. It was how America's working class remembers the 1950s collectively, or how Trump does, which was that a working class person could start a family, fund a family, support a family, the spouse wouldn't have to work. They would have accessible homes, accessible health care, accessible education, and they could live what was colloquially called the American drink. They could be. wealthier and better off than their prior parents. They could have economic security. They could have

pride in their work. Vance talks about this. Tucker Carlson often talks about this. That for, there's something about manufacturing that provides a psychological boom to the working class, not just a creative entrepreneurial boom in terms of innovation. The degree to which you have manufacturing presence is directly proportionate to the direct, the amount of innovation you create in new ideas, new projects, new technologies, and the rest. There's some, some, you know, connection there that's almost inescapable. Russia's almost rediscovering aspects of it when they were forced by European sanctions to more fully, thoroughly, completely reindustrialized, enriching and empowering them, arguably, much more so than they were before the sanctions ever existed.

So Putin's not worried about that, amongst other reasons why he's not worried about foreign sanctions. The, as he's built up an economy largely immune from it, he did that after the first wave in Crimea sanctions. So to them, everything that was promised about China was a lie, that America's working class have paid the price for all of it. And they have no more interest in America's working class continuing to pay that price. Their perception of China internally, in terms of what they think they're negotiating leverage is vis-a-vis China, this is where you get very divergent perspectives. You have some people that think China's economy is really growing and society is very stable, its politics is really good, and so forth. That is not the majority view within Trump world.

Now, it depends on which aspect. You have some that I would even call more in the neocon, kinetic conflict side that will actually, in my view, exaggerate China's potency and power for the purposes of saying they're a threat, like to the super chat question earlier. The Vance and his world aren't as fully convinced of that. So in terms of U.S. political perceptions of China, you have multiple strains influence. That's the broad overview in terms of the economic relationship. In terms of internally, the first opposition to China came because the Chinese Communist Party winning in China. So you had the anti-communist Cold War mindset mentality.

But that then shifted to the Soviet Union with Nixon's detente with China in the early 1970s. The next wave of opposition to China in the U.S. or hostility to China in the U.S. came from religious groups. Started out with evangelicals and Catholics. And this goes all the way back, 1860s, various treaties between China and other countries about how Catholics and missionaries would be treated within their country during the opium wars. Britain tried to force it on China over and over again. You will take the opium. You will use the opium.

I can see where China may have certain perspectives on fentanyl based on that history that they still remember very well to this day, particularly their leadership cast. But that led to further things. John Birch Society was founded after John Birch, a missionary to China that they believe the Chinese Communist Party was behind murdering. So you had evangelical opposition to China. China, the next level of opposition to China came from various other religious dissident groups. This includes primarily more aligned with the left and celebrities, Tibet.

So support for Tibet led to a group of people that are to this day opposed to China. Senator Monaghan's daughter, I was at a dinner and all she would do is talk my ear off about how bad China was because of Tibet. She was going on, oh, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it. But, you know, that's a very intense sort of cause-seleb within certain communities. And then the other Falun Gong, a religious group that felt persecuted by China, including things like forced organ donations and things like that. And they helped found publications like the epoch times. So China uncensored, for example, that if you want to see a China skeptical perspective on YouTube or elsewhere,

either the Epoch Times or China uncensored would be good illustrations and examples of that. You don't have to agree with everything. It just gives you what that perspective is. But that comes, they were founded by the Falun Gong, members of the Falun Gong. The next wave of opposition to China was something I personally experienced as a young intern at the AFL-CIO, America's leading labor union. And that was I worked with Harry Wu, the longtime Chinese labor activist. And so my initial early experience with China was that labor movement in the United States strongly opposed how China was treating its workers. And as a potential threat to America's labor, laboring classes and its,

labor unions especially, particularly the manufacturing industry, where they ended up right and the Jeffrey Sachs and others of the world ended up wrong about what would happen with China to America's working class. Then you have two other aspects that have been added over the last decade or so. One is I would call sort of the neoliberal economic globalist side who believes China should be a subordinate factory worker. This is where you might find George Soros being critical of Xi. And it's like, oh, that seems a little bit odd. I mean, even though, because China was supposed to be the economic boost, the economic foundation, you could argue, of economic globalists. You're going to be our factory worker. But from their perspective, it meant subordinate factory worker. And they think

Xi sticks his head up a little too much and is a little too nationalistic. And so there you'll see some neoliberal opposition to within the global economics, even to China. It's not universal by any means. Jeffrey Sacks strong advocate for China and some others. So you'll see a diverse range of opinions within that scale. On the neocon space, they want kinetic conflict. They want to prove, I mean, like people wonder, you know, why is the deep state the deep state? No war, no money. No war, no power.

So they got to find it. I mean, well, what are you going to do? Trump sort of accidentally let this out a couple of weeks ago. Where he was like, oh, no, I was asking at the Saudi speech when he rift. He's like, ah, you know, it's amazing to make all these weapons. He never get to use them. What's the point? He just briefly mentioned.

Yeah, exactly. That's the issue, right? It was like China is using the India-Pakistan conflict to see how well their drones work and part of the conflict. It's a test ground. All the military industrial complex of the whole world has been used in Ukraine as, hey, see how good our weapons. These tanks work, these drones work. I mean, it's a sick mindset, but this is how these people work. They make money building these war instruments that only have any purpose if there is a war.

No war, no machines. No war, no money. No war, no power. So they're in the war business. So that's the Pompeo side. then you have I would call, you know, Lightinger represents this perspective. Peter Navarro, to a certain degree, represents this perspective. And this influence is part of Vance.

And you see it represented sort of Mearsheimer's perspective. And that goes to the earlier super chat question. Sees China as a power threat, as a power competitor in Asia. And for them, now, like Trump's general perspective is he doesn't really care who runs Asia. Doesn't care. You mean that kind of clear. The Americas will be fine. I think what you were pointing out earlier about great powers with regional

controls is Trump's strong orientation. Trump loves President McKinley. So people should go back and study Kevin Phillips, did a great biography of President McKinley. That will give you a sense of what's informing Trump's framing and filtering in perspective of the world. Vance a little bit more different. Vance is influenced to a degree by Mearsheimer.

And so he does see a bit of this global power challenge. And what has sort of arisen in this context, two things. rise of China's military spending, how there were various activities in the South China C's interpretation of the Belt and Road Initiative, because of two things, they recognize the Belt and Road Initiative not only had a potential economic gain, but it had a potential from China's perspective, security, from certain American perspectives, military incursions, military empowerment, that these ports had a military capacity. So the things that might look as civilian up front under domestic Chinese law, it's supposed to be able to serve

military purposes as well, that they see it as a potential military expansionistic threat. I'm still a little bit more aligned with McGregor who sees what China is doing is mostly paranoia of invasion because of what happened in the mid-19th century with the two opium wars and the rest, and that their military really isn't being designed for expansionistic purposes. But there are others that have a very different view. They think that China is openly planning and intending to run the world in their mindset. And they look at books like unconventional war for. The Chinese government wrote in the late 1990s or high-ranking military security people did.

And they look at the sabotage. That's the other issue where China has lost a lot of allies in the United States is various forms of sabotage. This includes intellectual. Basically, you'll hear this story again and again, which is somebody goes and invest in China. Within a couple of years, China steals all their products, all their intellectual property. The rest kicks them out, steals all their money. And you get variations of this. People will find a knockoff product that they make.

All of a sudden, China's making the same thing. being advertised or marketed on TikTok. They look at Chinese propaganda through TikTok, showing racial divisiveness and cultural divisiveness and those kind of things. And so they think that what sits behind that is not China trying to protect itself, but they think China trying to influence the American public

for China to dominate the world. And this reflects longerstanding concerns seeing communism is indistinguishable from imperialism. I have some doubts about that, but that's some of the perspective that is informing them. Now, I have doubts about where China is economically. Now, it's almost impossible to get honest data.

You have the China beige book, which is good. That's an attempt to recreate the beige book for, but for China. You know, China has no interest in giving out negative data about itself. You know, and it's still the Chinese, you know what it reminds me the most of. You know, you guys will understand. It was like trying to figure out what the heck was happening in the Soviet Union in the 80s. You know what I mean? I was like, you either got all Soviet propaganda or all.

anti-soviet propaganda, figuring out what the heck fire was going on. You had somebody on the ground somewhere, someplace, the intel, you know, naughty. And that's what China's like for me. Now, if you want to see a more China skeptical perspective of a couple of guys who lived in China, but are very independent. They're not connected to any state actors. The China show on YouTube is very good for that. It's actually very funny.

They have a lot of funny stuff mixed in. But if you want to see that, they live for about a decade plus in China, have friends and family still in China. And they have a China skeptical perspective of what the Chinese Communist Party is up to and what's happening within China. From their perspective, and this is partially represented in aspects of the Trump administration, and it's going to moderate how he handles aspects of China. If you think China's weak, not like this is where some of the pro-China advocates,

I think are actually undermining China's interest by trying to make China look very strong because that's going to trigger concerns in certain aspects of, from the great powers analysis of Amir Shimer, that, oh, China's got to be taken down a notch. because they're about to be so powerful, because they're about to be so, if they're really not, and they're weaker, what happens if you push a trade conflict and the only way the Chinese Communist Party feels it can maintain powers to go to Taiwan or to have war to get out of internal political trouble because their economy is actually internally weak that tariffs could push over the end. And I think how you analyze those underlying dynamics is going to actually influence policy and figure out the truth is difficult. I mean, there's evidence that China's economy is weak. There's always been a big question. Could you use the American system using trade policy and industrial policy to build up a big manufacturing base without also building up a domestic consumer base, which has always happened before in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere in prior examples?

And can you do so with a command and control economy? Because in theory, entrepreneurialism will unleash the sort of economic freedom. but that is limited when you have a command, fundamentally command and control policy. And how are those two going to work together? It's always been an open question. One interpretation works just fine. Another interpretation is it's already, there's fractures in the very foundation. And so that, you know, you see factories on fire because people have not been paid wages,

so they protest by it. It happened a week ago where a guy became a popular mean character because he went in and set his factory on fire in China. People who have no political expression out with, who do things like, They're having to put up various pillars to block road access to schools because these people kind of lose their mind of everything that's happening and drive through and kill kids as a public protest expression. When you don't have an easy means of expressing protest or thinking you can change the power structure, what do you do when things like your life savings disappear because the real estate economy has imploded as it has in China because they had to shift after the global financial crisis to more employment through a domestic construction and infrastructure industry. You can only build so many bridges and so many buildings. And what happens when China has the biggest real estate bubble,

according to some data in the history of the world, and there's at least some independent verification of that. And big real estate developers like Evergrand, having the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the world. So what do you think is really happening internally in China is going to shape U.S. policy towards China, influenced by these various strains of people who are skeptical of China for varying reasons, some economic, some cultural, some religious,

some political, some geopolitical. I don't know fully the answer is the long and short of it. Expect Trump to try to balance it out. He wants to leverage U.S. economic consumer market access to reindustrialize and re-onsure American industry. He will highly prioritize those industries that are high-value jobs that have national security implications. This includes steel. For him, auto is a big deal. United Auto Workers is critical to support places like Michigan, which was a critical swing state.

That's why when he announced his terror policy, number one target was China, number one audience, United Auto Workers. He is absolutely committed to this. What he is mostly worried about is not so much China's reaction, regardless of what's happening internally within China. His concern is how to the global equity, the globalists who have incredible, not only institutional influence in the think tanks, the academies, the House and the Senate, just like the deep state does. But they have incredible power on Wall Street, incredible power in the financial and real estate. markets. We've financialized our entire Western economies, I think, to great detriment. You can read Kevin Philb's book, bad money for how this would lead to bad outcomes for long-term prosperity for America's working class and the working classes of the West. So that's going to be his priority, is figuring out how much can he leverage tariffs to get this outcome without economic globalists sinking the market

deliberately, shorting the market deliberately. Here, I don't fully agree with all of his points, but I think he's on to a good kernel of truth, which is Tom Longo, who you guys, have had on. Like guns and whatever. He's got a great, great, great, great title for his shows, like guns and gold and, you know, other popular stuff. I was always smoking cigars when he's talking. So I like Tom. But he was like Trump will focus also in part is Europe.

It's divorcing from Europe. It's separating from Europe. It's trying to reduce the influence of the euro dollar, which is the dollar, you know, issued by global banks outside the United States that Alex was mentioning earlier that has been the financial foundation of this entire globalist experiment, of which the EU is a critical constituent component. if Trump could have the EU collapse, it would be fantastic for Trump's long-term view of restoring a national, independent, economic-driven world rather than globalists.

I mean, I don't know how, how is Germany going to handle this? I mean, Germany is already practically deindustrializing. They can't handle a major tariff policy from the United States, to my knowledge. I mean, that they keep digging one hole, digging another hole, apparently Metz's a magical straw. It doesn't work for IQ. It doesn't boost that part of it. However, many Zelensky train trips, you want to take. So that's Trump's general perspective on China.

And Vance is a little bit more on the geopolitical strategic side, sees China as more of a national security risk, not to the degree like Pompeo does. If you want to see Vance's view about a year and a half ago, he did a speech on what he meant by his China policy. And his focus, like Trump's, was economic and national interest, not war, no interest in getting into a war with China whatsoever. That is still the strong, overwhelming influence on the Trump administration.

is an opposition to wars that usually lead to disaster and debacle. But there is a skepticism of China. Trump's perspective is simple. China negotiated well for themselves. It's time to negotiate for America. That's Trump's view. He wants to reduce the amount of Chinese competition with the United States by using tariff policy to equalize it.

That's it. For Vance, it's an additional component of whether or not they're a security threat. Are they going to continue to do things like put things in solar panels that show up in the United States, that you later find out could do things like maybe turn off the power grid? of the United States. Things like he has more saboteur concerns about China. So however you think of that or assess that, that's his perspective. And you have Sach's perspective. He sees China is a very peace-oriented, very Confucius influence. Now, of course, for my own perspective, I didn't remember that Sun Tzu's book was called Art of Peace. That's kind of a lot of going to go to art of war. But those are the

different perspectives and that are going to continue to influence the administration. Right, very, very interesting. Now, there are few things to say. Firstly, I just wanted to say something. I just wanted to say something about the American system and how it's interconnected in the 19th century with US foreign policy at that time. The American economic system was a economic system that was anchored on peace. It absolutely believed that the United States should focus on peace. I think it was Calvin Coolidge, who said America's business is business. And that was very much the dominant policy in the United States in the late 19th century, right up until the moment when the Cuban War began.

And that Cuban War was itself something. It must be said when it happened of an anomaly. People talk a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and what he was up to and, you know, all the policies that he followed. But in fact, he didn't deviate as president very much from the, American mainstream foreign and economic policies up to that time. You start to see the change with Woodrow Wilson, who has a different view of the kind of policies that the United States should be following. So just to make that point, it was protectionism, industrial policy within the United States,

infrastructure policy, within the United States. the operation of markets as not just, or rather I should say financial markets, not as, you know, the dominant part of the economy, but as an important part of an economy that is larger than themselves. All of those things taken together were, as I said, very much based on the assumption that the United States would remain peaceful, that its military would not be overextended and certainly not in. involved around the world or any of those sort of things. And there was a popular policy, exactly as we say in the United States. But it wouldn't be correct to say it was the popular policy in the United States. It was the policy that everybody took for granted. It was the underlying default assumption that people who worked in the factories,

in the shipyards, in the fields, of the United States, you know, the agricultural system and the money exchanges in New York in the political system. I mean, that was their default assumption about what the foreign policy of the United States should be in that era of the American system and of protectionism. So, and you could argue, and I would argue, by the way, that what changed the direction was the skill of certain European politicians, particularly British ones, in involving the United States in European affairs, and specifically in British affairs. And that is a huge story, which maybe we should one day do a dedicated program to. It's incredibly

interesting. And it happened at multiple different levels, and we've touched on it previously in previous programs. Now, let's turn to China because I have a lot of, I have, I have, I have, I have been very involved in Chinese affairs recently. I, I should say, just to say something, I've always been very interested in Chinese history and Chinese culture and Chinese painting and that kind of thing. But curiously enough, it's always been Chinese history, painting, literature, all of that. pre the modern era. It's the old China, which of course doesn't, you know, it's a different China today. But I've started to take a much bigger interest in China recently.

And I get to say what my own general sense is. Of course, this is an enormous country. It's huge. There are many different people with very different political views there. And there are parts of the economy that function extremely well. And others, no doubt. which has many, many problems. And so what I'm going to say now is just an impression of perspectives in China.

And I'm not going to say that everybody holds to these perspectives. But I think this is probably the dominant view amongst Chinese policymakers. And by that I'm also in the very large number of people who are involved in managing the economy at many, many different levels. which is that they're toughly pragmatic and extremely realistic. And they understand very well that China has come very far, very, very fast. And they also understand that China itself now needs to change and evolve and develop in all kinds of ways. They don't want to see an massive breakdown in the political system because China before the Communist Party of China, of the CPC gained power in the 1940s,

had been through a whole century of massive political instability. And this is something which Chinese people at every level are very, very conscious of and absolutely do not want to return to that. So they want to carry out that change, probably within the framework of the existing system. But they do understand that change is needed

and not just needed, but at many levels it's actually wanted. They want to see China evolve, maybe not fully in the directions, in the kind of social patterns that people in the West might want to see it change. But, you know, we're talking about China. We're not talking about, you know, the West. So they do understand all of that. And they also understand that because of this enormous growth that China has achieved, it's now, um, pressing against the United States in all sorts of ways. And I think what they want to do is that they want to manage that change. They want to dialogue with the Americans.

They want dialogue with the Americans at many, many different levels. Now, what I've heard from people in Russia that have read from people in Russia is that negotiating with the Chinese is incredibly different. difficult. They are enormously, you know, tough negotiators. They will negotiate over every single point. They will take advantage whenever they can, because partly I suspect that also is a reaction to the period of Chinese weakness, which is the one that we overlook. So it's, you know, they're almost overaggressive in the way that they negotiate. But if you are well prepared, if you negotiate toughly, they will respect you.

And it's possible to move forward on that basis. So I think that a tough administration in Washington is not something they're afraid of. What they are very, very much more afraid of is an irrational administration. in Washington that gets panicked about China and starts doing crazy things very much in the way that Joe Biden and his people were doing. My sense was when Donald Trump became president, there was a sigh of relief.

They were actually happy to see the back of Biden, Harris, and all of those people. They said, look, Trump may not love. like us very much, but we remembered him from his first term. If we negotiate toughly with him, at a personal level we got on with him, we can find a way forward. So I think that is the dominant mood in China today. Now, the events of April, of March and April, when we saw this cumulative effect of sanctions going up, oh, sorry, tariffs going up on each side. Now, that has probably somewhat dented that.

And I think there is some alarm, and there is some alarm about some of the things that especially Stefan Miran has been saying. But I think that if you've got together, a strong negotiating team, if you went

through all of these issues with the Chinese one by one in a detailed way, just as they do, when they conduct negotiations, then I think you could actually find that you could agree a way forward towards that economic divorce, which I think is ultimately what both the United States and the China and China at the present time, each in their own very different ways one.

If you give to the Chinese the sense that what you're trying to do is to put a ceiling on their economic, development, that is what they will push back against. And I think there is that fear in China that the United States doesn't want China to develop and become a prosperous country and an advanced country. But if you actually, as I said, seek an economic divorce, avoid military conflict, the preponderant feeling in China is, let's go with that. It actually, if anything, works to our benefit at this time. That this period of chimerica, as we used to call it, in Europe, when, you know, the United States and China seem to be

very tightly integrated, something that worked very strongly to China's advantage, perhaps not so much to America's advantage as we've seen, that that period is over and it doesn't really work for China itself anymore. So that, that I think is the sense I get from talking to people in China and from listening and what they have to say and from reading what they have to say. And yes, there are problems with statistics and yes, there have been many, many problems at many, many levels. And many people in China understand that very well. And as I said, they do want to sort it out. But they don't want revolutions or chaos or any of those things because they've been there before. And they've seen what happened in the Soviet Union and in Russia. And they say, for God's sake,

we don't want that over here. That's my overall sense of the whole thing. Speaking of great negotiators and our last topic for today, the Iran. So I think there's a lot of misperception of Trump's Israel approach in the populist community writ large. So you've got sort of domestic U.S. politics concerning Israel, different groups that influence it, the court of public opinion. The only sort of committed anti-Israeli audience comes from sort of the old progressive left, many of whom are also Jewish. And this goes all the way back to Jewish left criticism of Zionism and Israel as a concept and as a construct. And Lenin was very anti the construct. There are others at work. That goes all the way back to that debate. But the, you know,

But that's a relatively small, it's a very loud group, but it's not a very big portion of the American elected. The second group that's kind of anti-Israel in American politics to a degree are Muslim voters, for religious-based reasons primarily, but also for regional because of where they come from. A lot of them from Lebanon and other places that have a reason for hostility or in their some Palestinian population, of course, some Somali population, in terms of where Muslims in America come from. But they too are pretty small and outside of like Minnesota don't have disparate influence. And include some of the biggest Muslim states are also some of the biggest Jewish states like New York and New Jersey, for example. So politically they kind of counterbalance each other out. And so that's sort of on the left loosely aligned, though Muslim voters massively shifted in 2024 in places like Dearborn, where they probably have the most potential impact over Biden's Israel policy. And Trump made major inroads there.

And I think to a certain degree, Trump personally is probably most at ease and most comfortable in an Arab bazaars any place. I mean, you think of great negotiators and you think of Arab bazaars, right? You go and negotiate right there, I think. So you could see when he was in Saudi Arabia, he's very much at home in that world, very much at ease with that world. They even have similar cultural styles. You know, they like fancy things, like gold this, like that, you know, same mindset much more so than other parts of the world where Trump feels truly at ease and at home. But politically, he's been trying to create an alignment with the Arab royals because he sees them as a solution, if you will, to Islamic fundamentalism and to aspects of Israeli excess. So, but that's one on the only the, but the true anti-Israeli constitutes, like sometimes I see people in the global media misinterpret the loudness of the progressive left here with being a real movement in the United States against Israel.

That doesn't really exist. It's very small. it's 2, 3% of the population. They're real loud on social media. They're real out in protest. They go and do crazy things like murder people outside the Israeli embassy. But they're a tiny, tiny, tiny group. On the right, the main groups that support Israel politically,

and this in terms of voting constituencies, is evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews. But it's not all evangelicals. It's church-going evangelicals of a particular kind of type. So you have like church-going evangelicals and cultural evangelicals. So culturally evangelicals are people that what identify as evangelical Christian is born again in the, in the lingo and language that I grew up with in Tennessee. But they don't go to church very often.

And they're actually skeptical of the church as an institution. Like this confused, a whole bunch of pollsters and political consultants in 2016. So like, how could Trump get evangelical votes? Trump's this, you know, loud mouth, prash, New Yorker. You know, how is he going to win a bunch of church? It's because their image was an evangelical was a good church lady evangelical. who goes in church every time, as forever. But half of your evangelical population in America

does not regularly attend church. There are people I grew up with in East Tennessee who think the church failed them as an institution. You know, like a lot of working class Catholics believed today. So, you know, regardless of the new Pope, we'll see how that all works out. The, uh, and how that translates. But I did love all the memes. I love Trump putting the Pope hat on.

I thought that was great. A few whiners that complained. No working class Catholic I knew that likes Trump complaining. I thought it was fun. The, so, but the Orthodox Jews, about two, three percent at most. I mean, depending, they're mostly concentrated in New York City. So they don't have a lot of real political zeitgeist in terms of voting power. Now, they're disproportionately represented in certain conservative media, you know, Ben Shapiro,

Mark Levin, others that are aligned in that cause. But people shouldn't confuse that with actual voting power. The real voting power in favor of Israel, or on the Israeli issue writ large, comes from evangelical Christians who are co-religionists. and particularly Protestants. So, like, somebody were surprised that, like, Tucker Carlson is more skeptical of Israel. Well, Tucker's Catholic.

You know, the, and historically, not been a lot of love between Catholics, Jews. You know, a little more hostility, historically there. You know, the Inquisition, you know, mass expulsion of Jews from Spain, things like that to all my Catholic friends out there, you know. So the, that's just reality. And there's been more conflict, particularly post-Israel, between Muslims and Jews.

But for Protestants, much less. So like, you know, I mean, I grew up as a, in evangelical Protestant tradition. And we grew up, you know, being taught Jews are God's chosen people that Israel represents God's chosen people. So there wasn't hostility or animosity there at all. To the, in great credit, politically, of Israel, they'd made two tactical decisions that advanced their interest in the U.S. very, very well. First was choosing the U.S. over the U.S.S.S.R during the Cold War. So that gave them a big boost in the U.S. But even in the post-C. War era, The question was how much, well, the Israel still have allies in the United States. Well, Israel treated evangelicals very well because evangelicals see Israel as their, both of them, obviously, and some aspects of Islam as their ancestral homeland, though Islam is more Mecca and Medina than it is Israel. And you had free access. So if you're an evangelical Christian, you could tour anywhere you wanted in Israel.

You were treated very well in those tours. You could visit the Holy Land. That, to be frank, wasn't often true when there was Islamic control of the region. So because of that, there is a deep alignment of most, but it's more the church-going evangelical than the non-church-going evangelical. So otherwise, the populist inclination is to side with Israel over Hamas because for them, that's for two reasons. One is sort of a stage of the Cold War and reflective of sort of a co-religionist mindset

amongst the Protestants, especially in the United States. They see Jews as co-religionists, not oppositional religious. And then on the other side was who decided to align with the Palestinian cause. And just as the anti-war cause was done bad damage in the United States by its alignment with the hard left. So the Palestinian cause was done bad damage in the United States by its alignment with the hard left. First with the Soviet Union and communist advocacy that, you know, remade Yasser Arafat to a nice tie-wearing student into the Che Guevara-looking gorilla that he wore those out protest, revolutionary, that he would later become synonymous with. But just in general with the hard left.

I mean, even adopting the language and rhetoric, colonizer, imperialist. If you want to antagonize conservatives and lose their support, start accusing, start using language that sounds like a hard left a university professor. And unfortunately, a lot of people aligned with the Palestinian cause adopted that language and rhetoric. And all that did is push away.

You know, you're Mike Cernovich's of the world, right? your sort of normie populist, if you could call it back. That being said, what has been misunderstood by the Israeli supporters in the United States is there are limits to that support. And they're discovering it in live time. And Netanyahu is going to keep discovering it vis-a-vis Trump. So within the populist constituency in America, Netanyahu has always been viewed skeptically. And the reason he's always been viewed skeptically is some of us, we will never forgive him or pardon him.

for him running around the United States, preaching that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and we had to have a war in Iraq to make the world safe. Granted, Netanyahu was not the leader of Israel at that time. The Israeli government's official policy didn't fully confirm that, but it doesn't matter when it's Netanyahu who did it for the purposes of now. What that did is that so distrust with people in the populist camp of Netanyahu tactically. It's not because suddenly we're going to cheer for Hamas. But what it means is we're not going to reflexively do whatever it is.

Netanyahu has schemed up now. And then some of Netanyahu's early neocon advisors in the late 1990s came to be advisors in the U.S. who were preaching this whole general Wesley Clark talked about, you know, libertarian Dave Smith talks about. That, you know, the, in that, you know, is like, if you wanted to get the worst possible representative of Israel, have Douglas Murray be the guy. the guy who wrote a book called Neoconservatives, praising neoconservatism, and he's got a British accent, and he's an arrogant prick. He's all three.

I'll give Rogan credit. Let's bring the arrogant British prick on to represent Israel. Or you get Ben Shapiro, who just has Israel first tattooed on his forehead. The populist mindset is sympathy towards Israel, more sympathy towards Israel than Hamas or Fatah, but limits on the degree to which the U.S. should get entangled. in Israeli in the latest Netanyahu scheme, which it always seems, I mean, go back to those late 90s, I mean, you read some of those publications and there's some of the dumbest geopolitical analysis ever. It's like you can be the most pro-Israel person in the world. Why do you think overturning

in regime change throughout mid-east is going to lead to more peace? Why? Won't it lead to like more Islamic terror, maybe? That will cause you more trouble in the end, maybe? But they said somehow it would magically lead to an unearthing of, I don't know, the freedom of democracy or liberty or whatever. And all we've seen is disaster in Iraq, disaster in Syria, disaster in Libya, separate analogous disaster in Afghanistan. It's like we have no more interest in that. So interest in peace and protection and security for Israel, yes. But there are limits. The populist constituency that supports Israel is the critical tipping factor that you remove them from the political equation.

And Israel doesn't have majority support anymore. They're not going to have majority opposition ever, right? There's a part on the right. there's two parts on the right that don't like Israel. One is an honest principled libertarian position. David Smith is kind of an independent libertarian, but Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Thomas Massey, their position is real simple.

Israel's problems are Israel's problems. Let's not get involved. It's not pro-Israel. But that doesn't represent a big voting constituency. The populist constituency is what tips the factor to make sure the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world are aligned on Israeli policy. if you lose them, Israel loses its most critical and essential ally.

But Netanyahu is such a tactical moron. There were two other things that hurt with Netanyahu. Big one was his support of the Iraq War for which he's never apologized. And for all the other ideas of regime change that sounded idiotic, and to which, to my knowledge, he's never fully recanted. And if you want the pro-Israeli perspective on this, a really good substack writer is Elon K-O-W-E-R. Does great history, does great documents.

It'll give you a more Israeli sympathetic perspective. they'll balance with geopolitical realism. The second problem in Netanyahu that led populist skepticism here, again, best represented by voices like Alex Jones, was his COVID policies. He was a huge lockdown guy, huge vaccine guy. That led poppians wondering, how much of Israel is exactly an ally,

people forgetting Israel's very collectivist, started as kind of a socialist experiment, way back. You know, that's what Chomsky loved, the original little Israeli camps and more of that ideology than its current political orientation. But the third is, Trump will never forgive Netanyahu for what he did after 2020. So Netanyahu was the first major foreign leader to rush to endorse Joe Biden after the election

and basically reign on Trump's parade of challenging the election. And this story didn't get much coverage, but after October 7th, not long after, Trump did an interview, I think, with Newsweek, in which he suggested that October 7th was at least in part Netanyahu's fault, that it was his failure of adequate security. that that happened. That gives you a sense of the scale of skepticism Trump has towards Netanyahu. It's not a coincidence that Trump goes to the Middle East and this time, unlike his first term, skips Israel. It's not a coincidence that J.D. Vance canceled his trip to Israel after they decided to escalate in Gaza. So what Trump would like is you would like Israel to be peaceful, prosperous, an ally, but stop entangling us in stupid wars throughout the entire Middle East. And I've been skeptical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza because,

even if you thought it was a you thought they were morally right to do it. You had a self-defense position, which is in part Robert Kennedy's other people's position. He thought it extended self-defense you could do so morally and politically illegally. Okay, let's say you even stipulate to that. Was it going to work? Was it going to end Palestinian opposition to Israel? What are you going to replace Hamas with? Let's say you take out Hamas.

How has that worked? Hasn't everything you, every time you do any form of regime change, hasn't the regime changed to something more anti-Israel than what was before? something more unstable than what was before. So that was my skepticism of how the Gaza strategy. Now, I don't like language like genocide. Because to me, use genocide when it describes mass extermination of an entire population. I want it to be limited to its historical legal definition. You know, maybe you can call it ethnic cleansing.

You can call it. But let's, you know, I don't like it when it's accused of China's accused of genocide of the Uyghurs. I don't like it when they accuse Russia of doing it in Ukraine. I don't like it when they accuse Israel doing it, when your population is growing greater than their, when their population is growing greater than yours, not genocide. You can call it oppression. You can call it ethnic cleansing. You can call it a lot of other things. But I would like the language using that language just antagonizes as potential allies. It doesn't add to your allies from just a political persuasion toolkit. But Trump is not going to let Netanyahu get the U.S. into more stupid conflicts in the Middle East or undermine his global policy against Saudi Arabia, very important for oil, very important to lower energy input costs, very

important to Trump's cost of living agenda, which is the number one reason he won. Likes Israel, supports Israel, has a lot of fans in Israel. Ms. Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Aedelson, the big supporter, but he will not be hijacked by that policy. He has skepticism towards Netanyahu. He will do everything possible to he thinks nuclear proliferation is a great risk period. And he doesn't just isolate that to North Korea or in Iran. He says it's a great risk period. And he believes it's a great risk period. and he believes for a long time.

So he'll do everything possible to get a nuclear deal of non-prolifer which by the way, who does he need as the key ally to make that deal happen? Russia and Putin.

Another reason why he's very unlikely to escalate conflict to Russian Putin. That Russia is the intermediary of holding that nuclear material is probably critical to any deal getting done. But Tulsi Gabbard

immediately reigned on the parade when the deep state allies were trying to say, I mean, Naniel has been preaching this for 15 years. Iran's right about to have a nuclear weapon, right about to have a nuclear weapon, weapon right about to have he cries wolf every six seconds uh in october seventh is not an excuse to wage war

around the world and it caused the u.s to get into huge problem so that's i think accurately represents to the trumpian perspective i think trump thinks he can get a deal done with iran i think trump will get a deal done uh i think it's in iran's interest to get a deal done i think it's in trump's deal to get a deal done i think ultimat's even really in israel's long-term interest to get a deal done you know it's like what's bombing going to do i mean are you going to stop them from developing nuclear material because he's just going and raid and bomb whatever? And how do you know it's not going to escalate into a more broader conflict? I mean, it doesn't.

I mean, it's Netanyahu's tactical wisdom that I and other people than sort of the populist and geopolitical realist camp are skeptical of. It's not hostility to Israel. It's not favoritism. Trump has, Trump can respect the Arab royalist world. He can respect the Iranian perspective. As Putin pointed out, once we took out Gaddafi after Gaddafi got rid of nuclear weapons, we were going to create a permanent problem where nobody was going to want to give up nuclear weapons

because we had proven if you give up nuclear weapons, if you don't develop nuclear weapons, we can take you out of the moment's notes. That Gaddafi example is maybe the most disastrous decision for nuclear nonproliferation that has happened in the last century. So I think he understands that. He doesn't respect like religious fundamentalists of that kind of extreme. He doesn't even really understand them. Like to him, it's like, okay, if I find some way to make Palestinian lives economically richer,

That's Trump's mindset in general. Hey, if I make you richer, isn't that a good deal? We can have peace and everything work out. I make you richer. He thinks that's how most people operate. He almost doesn't understand someone for whom that doesn't process. It's like, those are weird people. He's got to stay away from it.

That's just the Trump mindset. So that's why he'll never be sympathetic with Hamas at all. Even if he's sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinian people. But he doesn't see as a solution, a two-state solution at this point. That's just what his perception is, it just wouldn't work. It's not going to happen. But what he's not going to do is let Israel drag America into another stupid Middle Eastern War.

And if the pro-Israel side doesn't hem it in and Netanyahu doesn't curtail his excesses, they're going to find themselves without allies anywhere in the world. So that's where I think that is like. I think he will get an Iran deal done. I don't think we'll end up with a war with Iran. He didn't brag about not doing the war in Iran in his first term to turn around and do it in a second term. And it's not an accident that he's not been visiting Israel.

in advance isn't visiting Israel. It's a recognition and it isn't an accident. They shipped off Mike Wals to the U.N. that Trump doesn't care about the U.N. at all. You couldn't ship somebody to a more useless place. When Trump really despises you, he sends you to the United Nations. Look at Nikki Haley. He's like, you know, I got to reward the lieutenant governor,

make him governors. I'm going to send Nikki Haley to the U.N. because he doesn't care what happens at the U.N. And so I think that's where it's most likely to the political fallout. So I see overreaches on both sides that the pro-Israeli crowd thinks they have such institutional support after October 7th, they can do anything in any time that they want, and they're wrong about that. And there's some on the anti-Israeli side that see the protest and the rest, and they think that means there's a real popular movement in the country

to be opposed to Israel. That doesn't exist in the United States in a meaningful manner. That's, that dynamic is not likely to change. But what is likely to change is if Israel gets us involved in another dumb war, they will lose critical majority support in this country from the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world, as they've already signaled. Oh, hello. Yeah, I was going to say, I think that's a very complete analysis. And I think you've described actually, I mean, my sense is that your description of the American mood about this is absolutely spot on. I don't think, I don't have any pushback on this at all.

What I'm going to say is a few things here. Firstly, when you said that Trump finds it very difficult to compute, that if you set out to make people rich and prosperous and all of that, you know, He can't understand the fact that maybe they don't see things entirely in that way. That is a very, very American problem. And Donald Trump is perhaps the most American president that has been in my lifetime. I mean, Lyndon Johnson in a kind of a way also. I mean, he was a different type of America, a darker side of America, maybe. But I mean, the thing about Trump is, I always say this, he reminds me,

very much of the Americans I remember coming to Europe in the 1960s. He's very much part of them. And he doesn't understand why people want to kill themselves and fight wars. Instead of getting to work and doing business with each other and trading and making themselves prosperous. It's a very American way of thinking. Now, I think that what the United States, needs in the Middle East is a stable Middle East, a peaceful Middle East. I think that lots of people have come to that conclusion in the United States itself. You said at the very outset of the

program that people like J.D. Vance and Pete Hexeth and Tulsi Gabbard have been and have served in the Middle East and they're very disillusioned about the whole experience there. And probably, I'm guessing, they don't like the way in which they feel that they were manipulated into going there, both by the neocons in the United States and possibly to some extent, and in fact, to a great extent, by Netanyahu as well. My own sense, and I say this, I think we are closer to a potentially stable Middle East than many people understand. I think Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states clearly wanted. I think most of the Arab states also wanted. I think that within the Palestinian community, they also want a return to peaceful conditions

and some of that prosperity that we were talking about, at the very least, provided they can have a degree of security and political rights that they've known. never been provided to them. I think Israel, if it were to act in a measured and moderate way and work with other countries, I don't think anybody in the Middle East any longer is thinking about destroying Israel or eliminate. Well, I'm sure there are people in the Middle East who do think like that, but I don't think they represent the predominant currents in the Middle East. I I don't think the Gulf states are interested in that.

I don't think many of the Arab states are interested in all of that. We have come, in other words, a very, very long way from the kind of Middle East that we had in the 50s and 60s and 70s when Israel was not accepted. And there is a third party who stands outside this process. And this is another place where I think Donald Trump, if he works with them intelligently, could usefully use them. And that is the Russians.

The Russians want to stay more Middle East. They want peace in the Middle East. They have good relations with the Palestinians, excellent relations with the Palestinians. They have civil and sometimes friendly relations with Israel. Netanyahu and Putin exchanged very warm congratulatory messages with each other on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the victory in Europe. Fad people didn't really notice.

And of course, Russia now has a big and growing presence in Iran, which, if it's approached intelligently, could be a stabilizing factor. So I think the Iranians also are now very, very tired of this endless confrontation with the United States, which has been going on since 1979. I think they understand too that it's holding back Iran and it's creating massive instability there. And I suspect that there's also forces in Iran which do want to see change and development in Iran and the evolution of the political system and even maybe the change of the political system. And they want the political space in order to do that too.

So I think that if all of the pieces are brought together, if you have an intelligent foreign policy, one which doesn't over-commit, which is, I think, the big mistake that the United States has made, if it doesn't over-commit, then actually a peace in the Middle East is within reach. And certainly,

a peace with Iran is within reach and a peace with Iran in which the United States and by the way Israel can be confident that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons because the Russians will be there and they'll be able to police it and as I said there's people in Iran

who really understand that that's basically a dead end anyway so I think this is I think the pieces are there. And maybe with the changes that you've been talking about in the United States, with this more populist current that's growing in the United States, maybe that can happen. I would like to think so.

I think it can happen anyway. That's my sense. Exactly. It's always good to hope for the best. I see the lights coming on in the background. So I've kept you up laid it up. It's been fantastic, as always. the Duran.orgals.com.

I'm a subscribing member and the rest and always a privilege and a pleasure, gentlemen. And Robert, where can people find you? The great Robert Barnes. If you want all the law and politics analysis, Viva Barneslaw.orgas.com. A couple of the references from the show, the China show you can find on YouTube.

Elon Hokkoer, H-U-L-K-O-W-E-R, you can find on Substac. And I'll have some betting picks up on the Polish election. Got to figure out the fraud aspect. figure out how likely the EU comes in and sets it all aside anyway. Poland, a little word of the wise, don't elect the president from the party that has as its prime minister a man who ran around saying Trump was a Russian agent. Probably not a good idea for U.S. Polish relations.

If you want to have any over the next three years, probably bet the other way. I might be betting that way too. We'll see what the odds are done. That's at sportspicks.locals.com. As always, a privilege and pleasure with the to be here. Thank you so much. I have a privilege and pleasure for us to have you, Robert, if I may say. as always a very, very interesting and educational program.

And just to say, we didn't perhaps discuss, we didn't take out the whole program, thank goodness, on the judicial aspects, but I learned an awful lot of you about that today as well. We'll have all of Robert's links in the description box down below, as well as a pinned comment, and we will answer all of the super chats. They will be online tomorrow in a dedicated video.

So look out for that as well. Great Robert Barnes. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care, everybody. I think.