The Duran Podcast - Regime change escalator w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Regime change escalator w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

All right, we are live with Alexander McCurice in London and joining us once again on the Duran, the one and only the great Robert Barnes. Robert, how are you doing? And where can people follow your work? Yeah, for all the law and politics, that's at Viva Barneslaw. Dot locals.com. For prediction markets involving elections and more sporting events, you name it, that's at sportspicks.com.

otherwise on X at Barnes underscore law. And it's been, well, the one thing you cannot say about the Trump administration, it's never boring. It may end up a nuclear war, but at least it won't be boring. Very, very true. So let's get into all of the foreign policy stuff that is going on with the Trump administration. A quick shout out and hello to everyone that is watching us on all the various platforms. and also a shout out and hello to our awesome moderators. We have a lot of ground to cover.

So Alexander Robert, let's jump right into it. We do. We have a huge amount of ground to cover because this winter has been one of the most astonishing winters in foreign policy that I have seen, well, ever, frankly. And my memory goes back to Lyndon Johnson's time. So that tells you something. So frantic activity, Venezuela,

the abduction of Maduro, the case against him in New York, which I would actually quite like Robert's views about that when we eventually get to it, but there's more important things perhaps to discuss the politics, the extraordinary change in policy. We've had more rumblings about and potential attack on Iran. This is the president who won the election, saying that he was going to be the president of peace, who was going to avoid intervention, who made a few speech, a speech, a few months ago in Saudi Arabia criticizing the neocons, talking about how neocon foreign policies were completely wrong and utterly misguided. He was talking in that way. We now see frenetic activity, all of which looks to be in the opposite direction. And one gets the sense

of an administration that is also part bewildered by all of this. Some people enthusiastically supporting it. Some people, you know, like outside the administration, like Lindsay Graham, never looking more happy. Others, like the CIA director, Radcliffe, looking increasingly influential. Others apparently pushed aside. And there were reports that the director of national intelligence, no less, Tulsi Gabbard, supposedly, She wasn't even informed in any way about the whole Venezuela operation, even though one would have thought that the Director of National Intelligence would be the first person, not the last person to know.

So somebody, the only person I can think of who can make sense of all of this and explain it all to us and explain what is actually going on in Washington is Robert Barnes, who has his finger on the pulse, has a, is able to talk to people and get a sense of things. And can also tell us how all this is going down in the country, the wider nation, where of course they voted for Donald Trump, assuming that he had a completely different agenda

from the one that we now see. So Robert, where to begin? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about who was behind the Venezuela, operation and whether it's really true that Tulsi Gambard was indeed frozen out and where that leaves her and what the state of the U.S. government currently is and who really matters in it and who doesn't. No doubt. I was just up in Washington, D.C., with some friends of mine sort of making the rounds, both to sort of get a sense of what's happening, how the city is now in the first year,

about to enter the second year of the second term of the Trump administration. And what differences and distinctions may be there between the first term in terms of just the general sense and sentiments in the capital met with people high, medium, and low throughout both the executive and legislative branch. I usually do those meetings off the record. And so don't reveal who I talk to, when I talk to, where I talk to, so on and so forth. Usually meet them outside of their official barometers so that there's no log of me ever even being there. In fact, usually when I stay there, I make sure that I stay, let's just say,

there's no record other than the Plain Fair of me ever being in the District of Corruption, as it's colloquially called by some of us. And in that capacity, you know, learned a lot, developed a lot of interesting information, was able to get certain things moving, certain balls moving in certain areas of policy, food freedom, medical freedom that are important to people at 1776 Law Center and to the Trump voters, because The one thing that's missing in Washington that's been missing now, arguably from our founding, is a lobby for the American people. There's a lobby for everybody else, but there's no lobby for the American people.

And the goal was to try to present the voters' interest and make sure it's being implemented a range of government bodies. But it was very educational and informative. And there's really shocking differences between this and the first term. On the positive side, in the first term, basically the political establishment was still in control of D.C. at every single level. Trump had mostly put Bushites in key positions of cabinet positions throughout, and that you felt that very little of the Trump agenda was going to get done.

And it was only going to be what could he restrain bad from being done rather than affirmatively good that could be done. This time around is very, very different. The town feels like a, the establishment feels like it has fallen. I've told people the town was so vulnerable that I wish we could bring some Visigoths back and we could sack it like Rome. It's that kind of atmosphere, that kind of dynamic. A lot of the old school lobbyists don't know what to do. Now, in that gap has entered a bunch of new quote-unquote MAGA lobbyists who are, in fact, corporate grifters selling out MAGA to everybody you could name. Military industrial complex, big pharma, big ag, big tech.

Some of the biggest adversaries of the populist movement that brought Trump to power are being represented by so-called advocates. of MAGA. Two examples of this that came up commonly was Arthur Schwartz, who infiltrated the Trump world through Donald Trump Jr. by misusing and abusing his relationship with Donald Trump Jr., unbeknownst to Donald Trump Jr. And Mike Davis portrayed himself as a true MAGA, justice reformer, antitrust guy who's busy bragging about the million-dollar checks he's getting from big corporations to sidetrack and sidest swipe the Trump administration's populist policies and undermine many good there are the good news was there was

there is good people on the who really care mostly about voters throughout every level of the government on the executive branch through it I mean every both breadth and depth so you got people at the top people the middle people they're just everyday people the that still have some influence as part of the government and in every single department including the Defense Department, including the intelligence branches, including the national security apparatus, including the Justice Department, etc. The really most corrupt rogue actors on the law enforcement side are Pam Bondi, its Attorney General, at the Department of Justice. The reason why there have been no big, deep state prosecutions is she has cut a deal that basically she helps her lobbyist pals derail antitrust investigations, derail fraud investigations at FTC, derail civil fraud.

investigations in the civil fraud division and the key tam divisions of the justice department derail criminal cases get bogus pardons for corrupt and rogue actors and in exchange for all of that pay for play that's what she was known for in state of florida when she was attorney general there pay for play pam she in turn make sure that the key she recognized the key in the key in group of people that could derail her in dc is not the mag of voters because they don't have any lobby in DZ, but is rather the Deep State. So that's why they cite. She's deliberately sandbags. The case against James Comey and the case against Letitia James has slow walked the case against Adam Schiff. It was an independent group that brought the case against

John Bolton because John Bolton ticked a bunch of other people off. So that was not run by her. It's why she slow walked every other deep state case down in the Southern District of Florida against the likes of John Brennan and Clapper. And again, Comey and crew. So that's why all of those cases have gone nowhere. It's why they're setting up someone to be a pure patty. They've set up a black autistic individual to be a patsy as the pipe bomber when it was actually someone that's currently on the CIA payroll who did that.

So that was very interesting in selling information. But her days may be numbered because Trump doesn't like getting played like a fool like Pam Bondi has played him like a fool. The other components of that, that you even saw. The Vice President Vance announced a whole new assistant attorney general position for fraud to put all of that under one roof. If you want to get to the Somali fraud, for example, involving that aspect that's been big news here in the United States, it's sooner or later going to take you to the CIA and their connections to everything that happened there, us waging that war in Somalia. Now, we were bombing them again last week.

We've been bombing them since the 1980s. That's why that's here, but that's all CIA connected. All these NGOs that are involved in the. a massive illegal immigration scam here in the United States in terms of bringing them in, as well as all the illegal fraud that takes place once they're here. Those same NGOs are connected to the National Endowment for Democracy, USA, the CIA, and all the rest. They're all part and parcel of the same equation. The Soros organization, which I found out it's actually being run by his son now,

because George Soros apparently has had multiple strokes. and so his kid who apparently makes Hunter Biden look like a beacon of integrity when it comes to a wide range of behaviors is now in charge of all that massive money in the NGO space. So the reason why none of that is happening is entirely being bottled up by Pam Bondi as pay for play pan. Help the deep state cover for the deep state get rich and help her buddies and pals get rich by closing down civil and criminal cases on the other side. The other aspect, to your point on Venezuela, is that for the most part, the Trump administration is still deeply divided within in terms of its policies. And you have Trump at the top. And as Alex and both of you pointed out, Trump can go either way on any day. I mean, it's, it really is like a reality TV show.

Tune in next week, nuclear war, no, let's get those finale ratings up. You know, it's that kind of dynamic. And he can just, but part of why he's going in one direction is because Susie Wows, his chief of staff, who sits in on all these national security meetings, which is very unusual, is because she is gatekeeping so aggressively. And she's gatekeeping in the name of preventing leaks that infected the first administration. But the effect of her gatekeeping is that good people throughout the administration can't get access to Trump to give him independent information and intel.

And so on the deep state side of the aisle or the neocon side of the aisle, you have Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Ratcliffe at CIA. Those are the main people. Bessett is in and out of that equation and has sometimes dissent sometimes does it. The real power center is Rubio and Ratcliffe. Those are the ones pushing all the regime change efforts, all the military intervention efforts. the one, you know, bringing Lindsey Graham around Trump all the time, having him on the golf course, having them on Air Force One. You know, he was almost, you know, orgasmic when he was on into, oh, look at all the wars we're going to get to do this year. The, you know, got Trump to sign, make Iran great again, hat, all that kind of jazz. So that's, and behind them is the broader think tank apparatus, the national security apparatus. That is still firmly in place.

And because they're not fearing Justice Department at all. because of how pay for a clam is part of that. On the other side are the people who actually care about what the voters wanted, which is Vice President Vance, under Secretary of Defense, Eldridge Colby. It was until he recently departed, Director of Policy for the State Department, Michael Anton, which was a sign of how bad of a problem Rubio is becoming,

that he left rather than continue to try to reform the administration. These are the people that basically authored the National Security State, statement about reprochement with Russia, about spheres of influence, about some degree of, you know, avoiding a kinetic conflict with China that consider the Middle East at the very bottom of their priority list. So, you know, not Iran, not helping Israel and, you know, bomb Lebanon and Syria and Gaza and everyplace else, not invite headchoppers to the White House, et cetera, and a geopolitical realist position on Latin America. And with some more, you know, they're more okay with. So Venice as well as there was not as much pushback. Now the most anti-war wing is is has been almost entirely

relegated and that's centered at the office of director of national intelligence, which is Tulsi Gabber, deputy director Joe Kent. There's other people I know who work there as well, who are very good people who have a strong skepticism of intervention in general. They have been mostly, as has been publicly reported, excluded from almost all the intelligence concerning the And they use the Iran War, the first Iran war to do it. They use that to blacklist them, say, see, President, you can't trust Tulsi Gabbard, you can't trust these people. They won't stay on script.

So they have been, they're mostly focused on internally trying to clean up the corruption of the intelligence agencies from going back to Russia gate and all the assassinations. And right now they're looking at the 2020 election and they're looking at COVID. That's how they're, that's all they have right now in terms of power. They don't have power in terms of influencing intelligence. on ongoing military operations or possible military operations. And then Robert Kennedy, who has a very instinctive anti-war deposition, he is by far within the rest of the cabinet in the administration, the most popular cabinet official.

So it's basically Vance and Kennedy, whenever I met with people, they're asking me if I could set up meetings with Vance or Kennedy. So gives an idea. I mean, the mojo behind them is really strong. There's a lot. I think they underappreciate their potential political capital. They're seen as the intellectual engines of MAGA in the modern, in ways that they don't, nobody really frankly perceives Trump as. And so that's, those are the different dynamics. My understanding is why we went in the event as well. And what I strongly suspect is the case, without disclosing who said what, is that they, is that a singer convinced Trump that the, there was a bunch of easy.

to get oil resources if he went in and just seized Maduro, that the CIA, which has been running the administration's foreign policy now for six months straight, which was likely behind the attempted assassination of Vladimir Putin. And in fact, they keep doing this to him over and over again. It appears that Trump did not know in advance of the attacks on that Israel was going to attack Iran the first time while Hamas was going to be, I'm sorry, while Iran was doing negotiations with his aid, Whitcock. because that was embarrassing to Trump that had happened that way. Then they did it again with attacking Hamas. Apparently Trump did not know in advance then either. Now, Trump doesn't like to look like he is so weak and out of it that he doesn't approve these things.

So after the fact, he approves these things. But it's constant. They're doing it to him over and over again. They did to him again with Russia, where they knew about where Vladimir Putin was, launched that drone attack, led leak to the New York Times that they were running the whole operation to the complete embarrassment of President Trump.

by saying, hey, President Trump is bragging about how he doesn't know about the drone warfare being run by the CIA. And he said, this is great of plausible deniability. Well, not when your CIA director yips it to the New York Times. But, you know, that gives you an idea of their brazeness, their aggressivity is getting crazy. And they were the ones who orchestrated, organize the efforts to take out Maduro. They didn't get pushed back from the realist wing because the realist wing doesn't have as much concern of that in Latin America, as long as we weren't directly on the boots, on the ground boots. boots on the ground.

But one other giveaway was when he said that he talked to oil people before the attack and that the oil was great. Anybody that knows Venezuela as well as the oil situation knows that is not the case at all. There's no easy to get oil. It's big reserves. Its greatest reserves is based on likely exaggerated claims of Hugo Chavez and Maduro because it's good. It doesn't serve their purposes to understate the amount of oil they have. But it's a heavy kind of oil you use for asphalt, things like that. very hard to get the equipment because of the sanctions and mismanagement is an horrendous condition.

Exxon told him this right into his face in the White House, which apparently ticked him off. They're like, no, we don't want to go back into Venezuela, no, thank you, for a bunch of reasons. And so who was it? Well, yeah, the I believe his ex-oil expert, and reasonably the oil expert that talked to was Paul Singer. Paul Singer spent a decade trying to run Trump out of D.C., tried to prevent him. He, the origin of Russia gate all the way back to the very, beginning. The man who first put key people like Christopher Steele on the payroll was none other than Paul Singer during the 2016 primaries. Before the deep state picked it up and ran it themselves,

it all started with Paul Singer. Big Wall Street hedge fund guy, huge Israel first guy. Hates Trump has been behind a sabotage forever. But in 2024, it totally changed his tune, suddenly became a big donor. And around the same time, bought up a lot of Venezuela's debt that Venezuela owes through Sitko and some others. and basically bought it for dimes on the dollar. And so he, for his $50 million investment in the Trump 20204 campaign, he could profit up to $15 billion on just the Venezuela deal. So I think he misled the president into believing, oh, the oil is great. You'll be a hero.

You'll be an icon. Not like those idiot bushes who forgot to, who forgot to get the oil. That wasn't what happened, but forgot to get the oil from Iraq. That was the pitch. And so Trump thought win-win. he's hated Maduro for almost a decade. I've never fully understood why, but he does. He has hated Maduro doing those dances saying,

come can get me coward and all that kind of stuff. So he wanted an excuse to get Maduro, but this gave him the excuse, oh, we'll go in there and we'll be able to get the oil because the new administration will play ball because they'll be terrified of what they just saw, which is not really what's going on.

But loosely, we went in, I mean, it's, Smedley Butler's war is a racket, needs a sequel. Venezuela right now is that secret. Well, I'm going to say something, Robert. I've been listening very carefully to all you've said, and I've actually taken some hope from it.

That may sound surprising. But firstly, it is very, very good to know that there are many people still in Washington, not many people still, that there are many people who do care about voters, who do care about the real issues, that they're in the executive branch, the legislative branch, that they're all over the government,

and that there is conflict and disagreement about much of this going on. So it's not an administration that is united and implacable in pursuing these kind of policies. It's also very, very good to learn that the old establishment that caused Trump so many problems during his first term is basically broken. Now, that is something that, again, you have to have worked in government, to understand how important that is. It does look as if the 2024 election was an icebreaker,

that it broke finally and perhaps conclusively a kind of system of power that had developed in Washington over a very, very long time, and which basically ran the United States. And it seems that it isn't functioning, and it isn't functional in the same way anymore. From what I can tell, from what you've just been telling us, and you know it's important to stress again,

you've been to Washington, you've spoken to people, you've spoken, I have no doubt about this, to important people, you have a feel for the place. It looks as if two things are happening. Firstly, there is at the centre of it, a man, the president of the United States, very inexperienced, very insecure. It's perhaps not the nicest thing to say, but also getting on in years,

somebody who doesn't read very much, which I think, by the way, is a mistake, and I think he should start reading more, and therefore very easy to manipulate, and who is being manipulated by a relatively small group of people around him. and as a result making decisions, which sometimes he's not informed of in advance the attack on Iran, the attack on the Hamas officials, things of that kind, the attack on the Valdai residents. But he's then put in a position by the same group of people in which they say to him, look, either you back us or you are humiliated.

You are, it's exposed to the world. How little you actually control what we do and who are therefore able to lead him along. I agree with you, by the way, completely about the Valdei attack. The fact that even that directly after the attack, on Putin's residence, we started to get articles all over the newspapers, the New York Times, about how the CIA was in fact the people who were running the drone operations against Russia. I mean, that clearly was the CIA taking responsibility in the most in your face, an aggressive fashion for the drone attack on Putin's residence.

And it looks as if they were doing that, not just to basically infuriate the Russians, but also as part of a diplomatic conflict in Washington. And as a grizzled veteran, as I've often pointed out, of bureaucratic conflicts that take place in governments, I know exactly that game and how it is played. And that makes total sense to me. I mean, either you back us or you are exposed as powerless and ridiculous. It's a very, very well-known game that is often played. So there is this group that is controlling, I'm going to call him this, the old man. And there are still structures left over from the past, notably the same. CIA who are still very active and who still have all of the resources and who are still able

to feed ideas to the president and to win him over and to get him on side and to lead him down the path of things which he shouldn't be following. And lastly, as you rightly said, and of course this is perhaps the most sinister side of it. We have a whole group of very, very, very rich grifters, but you might be extraordinarily rich guzzillionaire dressed in a really sharp suit. But that doesn't change the fact that you're probably still, that you are still a grifter, you are one, who are also cashing in and are making what money they can out of this affair. It looks like this is much more fragile. If you go back into the past, if you look at other very aggressive administration, They got completely out of control.

Linda Johnson's, which I remember very well, by the way. George W. Bush's. This looks different. Am I right? No doubt. To the person's a super chat question earlier, it is not a coincidence, as we had suspected, but I got confirmed that once I understood what was going on at the Justice

Department, that this all relates to the Epstein files. So, you know, I mean, do people remember we had, for the first three, four months, No USA. We're going to cut off NED, cut off N.E.H. Cut off all these globalist neocan, deep state, intelligence, money laundering, grifting, election interfering operations around the world. I mean, Doge was going, Doge was about to go to the Fed, about to go to the Defense Department, about to go to the CIA, about the audit Ford Knox. Everything, we got, Trump saying no bombing, no attacks into Russia, period, was talking about, you know, had at the time of ceasefire on Gaza back in March. that was moving that needle, was in complete, full-blown peace negotiations with Iran, was in negotiations with Maduro. How did all of this suddenly reverse? And is it a coincidence that suddenly reversed at the same time, there was a sudden reversal on Epstein file?

Turns out no, because Pam Bondi's deal is she covers for the deep state, the deep state covers for her so she and her lobbyist pals can lie in their pockets and get fabulously rich in the near short term. and it was Bondi went to Trump and lied to him and said, oh, the Epstein files are all filled with you and your friends, Mr. President. This is a problem. What do we do? The and panic Trump. And then they used that to say, hey, as long as you play ball with us, we can keep a lid on where that Epstein files can go. All fraught, by the way.

The Epstein files by people that I know that are looking at those Epstein files do not implicate Trump at all in a meaningful adverse way. In fact, they arguably exonerate him because Epstein was obsessed with getting blackmail material on and was seeking it out from others while Trump was president. Well, he wouldn't be doing that if he already had that material. So it turned out they just lied to him in mass. And this huge scandal that's consumed his administration in the first term on Epstein files utterly unnecessarily self-sabotage is because Pam Bondi cut this deal with a deep stick. And the, so that, so there is a connection between those two and what you, it is a very fragile situation. It's, it's why you're going to continue to see sharp movements back and forth, you know, look like he's going to jump in and he comes out. You know, you're going to see that and people are like, oh, that's Trump's chaotic nature.

I recommend going back to the first term. On foreign policy, it wasn't this chaotic like it is this time. It's this time because he's under pressure from two different groups. one is the group honoring his voters who are also just smarter, frankly, than all these other people that recognize there's too much risk here. I mean, these are the people that are like, do not put boots on the ground of Venezuela.

That, okay, Maduro operation, no big deal in their minds, but anything further, big, big problem. Similar on a rant. Go ahead. Can we talk about Pan Bombi, Pam Bondi, because she comes up a lot of what you've seen, she seems very important. There's reports that Trump is very unhappy with her,

that there's talk that she might be on her way out. Is that true? And you said that she's lied to the president over the Epstein files. Could this be the reason why he's so angry? Because if he'd been lied to about something like that, if he's been told that you're all over the Epstein files, and on the contrary, they actually exonerate him, then I can absolutely imagine that he must be absolutely livid about this.

So what is happening with Pambolny? Because, by the way, one thing I've learned over the last 10 years is that he who controls the Justice Department controls Washington. I mean, that is the single most important department in government. But firstly, your thoughts about that. But what is actually happening to Pamponby? Well, the message from everybody, at literally every level

what pointed the finger at Bondi. Sometimes they knew that's what they were doing. Sometimes they didn't realize that's what they were doing. But I was able to put that together when I was up there. And so we got that information to the president this past weekend. And the two things really bothered Trump. I should say three things. To a certain degree in inefficiency,

not getting a certain. He's a result-oriented guy. Well, why haven't these results been done? You know, it's that kind of business mindset. So that's bothered him badly as this has been a constant source of embarrassment, zero arrest, zero rest, zero arrest. On all these big issues. The second is being lied to, as you point out.

And the third is what really triggers him is believing he's been played, particularly for lobbyist cash. So we were able to put all three together this past week, figure out the degree to which I didn't realize, I knew she was a problem. I didn't realize that she was sabotaging and misdirecting much of our foreign policy. That's the part I didn't realize the essential integral role she had in facilitating that shift in the latter half of the first year, the second term of President Trump's foreign policy,

which was much of it was really a radical shift from his first term. Like the people that think, well, this is who Trump's always been. Well, he really wasn't in his first term and they didn't try to murder him twice, impeach him twice. indict him four times, bankrupt him three times because the deep state thought he was an ally. That's a very unusual way to respond to an ally. So, but they, it, Bondi's the key to all of it. So Bondi's on the clock. She's likely to be out within, you know, it's no longer whether she's out within this year or even within months, it's within weeks. Bondi is going to, so she's going, she thinks the deep state can save her. So she's calling in all our tips on all those people to try to give her

some cover. It may force her to try to rush some prosecutions that she was trying to slow walk. So you may see something happen with Brennan, say, in the Southern District of Florida. The problem there is, when she does pull the trigger on that, that loses some of her deep state protection because Brennan is sort of an old guard of the deep state. So that's the catch 22 she's in. I don't think the, I mean, the corruption was so brazen. She was asking high ranking and other people to do things that are frankly criminal. And so the, and the, it was just, it was off the charts. And here's the, the way in part of this, we were able to put this together is because these nitwits brag to the press, but they brag almost exclusively to the liberal press.

The change happened with, they decided to go to the Wall Street Journal. And, uh, Alexander, you can imagine why. So they're big, uh, new newcomer lobbyist, fake MAGA who are going to shake down big corporations for huge cash using their connections to the administration through Pam Bondi to get it done. And they've infiltrated a bunch of high-ranking members and even members of Congress's staffs. So a lot of, and the staffs, people forget, are mostly kids that, you know, the, you know, they're like in their late 20s, early 30s. So, you know, the one staff that has been that they has been incapable of being infiltrated is Thomas Massey. That was the only congressman who wanted his,

one of the, one of the, one of the, that was Thomas. He was like, hey, Barnes, come me, got to take a photo.

We got to troll the internet. Let's have some fun. So he got, so he did. So the, that was his idea. But great guy, good guy,

every respect. He's the one, it's not a coincidence. Deep States trying to get through as we speak about a half a trillion dollar, whatever is, 500 million, $500 billion.

It's all big, a money for the National Endowment for Democracy in the current bill. They're trying to reinstate that. The bill, those supposed to, fully enforced doge cuts is actually being used to try to get the deep state cash back in their hands because they're getting nervous. The guy who's outing it and trying to cut it is the one and

only Thomas Massie. So my view is I don't think Bondi's deep state pals can protect her any longer. Now that Trump has put together why there's been no action, he's starting to put together. It will take him a while to fully embrace this because he went down the Epstein files of hoax. thing too deep psychologically. But he's starting to put together that that was the hoax was what Bondi told him was in the files. That was the hoax. And he's starting to realize she's the center of all of his problems.

The Epstein scandal problems, the lack of DOJ action problems, the derailment of certain foreign policy, the derailment of a lot of domestic policy. The FTC and the Fraud Division and the Ketam division, the Antitrust Division, those quartets of positions of influence, Vance is now looking at bringing them in under a new assistant Attorney General for fraud that he announced this past week. And the goal is to integrate or organize that because that can go to affordability issues on monopoly from a political perspective. That can go to illegal immigration corruption.

That can go to NGO governmental fraud, those issues, a bunch of issues that are very popular with young MAGA, with young populists that they can use, though by just enforcing the law in those divisions, they can really get a lot of those votes back to, mitigate their losses in the midterms, at least keep the Senate, and put Vance in a good position for 2028. The key to all of it, if the Trump administration is going to get off the mat politically and in terms of affecting policy as voters want, they have got to remove Pam Bondi. And I think she will be out within weeks. I don't think she last past April. That's very interesting. Can I ask about the other person that you mentioned quite a lot,

Susie Wiles. Now this is very interesting because clearly the Russians are well informed about some things that go on in Washington because I got somebody from Russia fighting to me quite a couple of months ago saying that, you know, Susie Wiles has played this enormous role in Washington. And I was a bit surprised and it turns out that's roughly true. So how secure is her position because you said that she acts as gatekeeper and that she's been able to persuade Trump that this is a way of stopping the leaks. And I can understand why Trump might care about that. I mean, the leaks were utterly destructive during his first term. And we do have far few leaks this time. And none that are remotely as damaging as the leaks we saw, especially in the first

few weeks of his administration. But how secure is her position? It's similar to like, see, like the reason why the Mike Davis's and Arthur Schwartz's of the world run to the press to brag about how they're corrupting policies by helping getting sweetheart deals for their clients who pay them a million bucks of pop in some cases is because otherwise how does corporate America know who has juice and who doesn't? So it's their PR campaign because they're not part of the old establishment. It's the if I'm a corporate potential client, how do I know you, Joe Schmo have juice? oh well look at this article in the new yorker look at this article in the at the Atlantic look at this article in vox and then they started they started being so uh egregious that they went to the wall street journal to advertise and market their skills but that of course is what we're able to use to get back get that to trump who started realizing how how big the scale is scammas that also leads

to problems for susy wives because she is implicated in many of those articles there are articles of these big lobbyists bragging saying look uh you know i actually opposed trump fought Trump. Trump knew that. You know, a good number of them back to Santis because they thought he was going to win in 2024. So, you know, those people are persona non grotto with Trump and for a wide range of reasons.

And so how are they going to get back in? And they brag that all they had to do is call Susie Wiles. That, well, that Susie Wels, she is gatekeeping to keep out a lot of good reformers who are working in the administration from direct access to the present. And some of these people are very high ranking officials, by the way, that do not have direct access to the president. These lobbyists get direct access immediately,

even when they were anti-Trump throughout 2024. And those articles are now back in the Trump is now aware of. The, that Wiles, the way in which, yes, he needs a gatekeeper. He just needs a gatekeeper who puts the voters first, rather than the donors first, and rather than the lobbyist first, and the institutional interest first. And this is why Wiles went to great lines.

Thanks. The giveaway that she was a rogue actor, Swampy Susie, as I like to call it, which apparently nickname has got around. I won't be on a direct White House list anytime soon. I got to sneak in there to get in there. There's a bunch of people that, you know, apparently the Soros-Scottie nickname got around too. So, yeah, is what is. Yeah, having a little fun. But the, uh, is that, is Paul Danes. Paul Danes who's challenging Lindsey Graham for the Senate, South Carolina, along with Mark Lynch. I think Graham is going to go down. I think he's going to lose in 2020. which will be a beautiful, beautiful thing. But the reason is that Dan's would have been the logical chief of staff to be the gatekeeper,

but the gatekeeper for MAGA voters, MAGA interest, not MAGA donors, not Trump donors, who most of whom are anti-Magher. And so I think there's a general sentiment. The reason why you see a lot of people that might otherwise have issues with Wiles not, you know, praise her publicly, is because they're afraid that have tried that have Trump replaces Wiles with somebody that isn't a good gatekeeper, that will become a chaotic administration writ large. And the leaks will start happening in mass. So they want somebody that Trump trust to effectively gatekeep, but gatekeep for voters rather than donors, it's increasingly

become apparent. That's what they need. They need somebody else in that role. Because Wiles is too brazen. And it was an utterly, the fact that she managed to survive the Vanity Fair piece, where she was dumb enough to get suckered into trusting institutional media. One of the things she said, by the way, is no, we can't go into Venezuela. We need a congressional authorization for that, which is going to be part of it.

The other reason they've got to get rid of her if Democrats take the house is because she's going to be witness number one because of her own statements because they plan on using a combination of Epstein and Venezuela to impeach Trump. And that's why how he handles that you know, has got to be carefully constructed. And it all might get complicated because the Maduro

trial may lead to some very embarrassing outcomes of its own accord that could blow that up in a whole other direction because the State Department gave bad advice. And once again, critically, the Justice Department gave bad advice to Trump about the risks of a Maduro prosecution. Well, I'm going to come to that. We're going to come to that in a moment. But let's actually go back to Susie Wells, because what you say provides some kind of explanation, a bureaucratic intrigue type of explanation of why she attended that meeting between Trump and the oil executives, because if the entire advice about the enormous, you know, oil riches that were going to come out to Venezuela was being provided by a friend of Susie Wiles, a political

ally, poor singer, then again, if you know anything at all about bureaucratic, bureaucratic, intrigue and conspiracy. You know that one of the conspiracies, if you're a conspirator, and you've been lying to someone, when that someone meets with the real experts, the oil companies, you want to be there so that you can see for yourself what they say, and then immediately be able to speak to the man you've been lying to and try to persuade them, well, actually, you know, they're not saying it quite the way you think. It's not that they're saying that oil is not really going to be supplied from Venezuela. You've got to understand what these people are saying and do that kind of thing.

I've seen that happen so many times that it's, I've seen ministers fall for that one. They bring their political advisors. They don't understand exactly what their, what real role these are plague. So that makes that makes full and complete sense to me. What is the plan with Venezuela? Is there a plan? Does anybody actually have a plan about I mean they what I mean they know they've now got Maduro and we'll talk about the case but do they have a real plan about how to move forward? Are they going to do what some are suggesting work with Delci Gonzales, to try to stabilize the situation there, trying to slowly rebuild the country, or are we going to get all kinds of people still going into Venezuela, trying to seize the

oil, which isn't there, to all of those things? I've heard actually that the economic situation in Venezuela is deteriorating and that inflation already at super high levels is going to even higher levels because Venezuela cannot sell its oil. So there isn't a huge amount of time to stabilize the situation there. Do they have a plan? Do they know what to do? Well, the way to think of it is that the person really pulling the strings is Paul Singer. I mean, to your point about the meeting of the, a good example, Rubio was in on, in on it with Wiles. And that's why he passed Trump the note when he realized Exxon was not going to play ball. Exxon was going to be like.

This is a shit show. We are not joining it. No, thank you. And the Rubio was the one writing him a note saying, go over there. Talk to Chevron. Chevron's on board. And of course, Trump actually read the note. He was like, oh, Rubio says.

He was supposed to just read the note, not speak it out. But that gave you an idea that he has no idea. Like, you know, it was like his first reaction when Putin told him of an attack on Russia. There's these little cues that confirm what I was told that Trump is not in on it. the uh and the she is so if you look at singer what's his goal just to get paid so if he can get enough oil to come to the u.s accounts that he can get his 20 billion plus he's done and satisfied so i think that's the only major driver the big oil interest as an interest are no longer interested in venezuela for a range of reasons 10 years from now maybe not now similar with the rare earths

they would rather take greenland than uh venezuela because to get those rare earth, you got all the mining and all those issues. But you've also got chaos issues, civil war issues, conflict issues. You've got FLN and everybody else that's up there in those jungles. You know, the, I think, was you guys, or so someone's interesting interviewing Patrick Lancaster. And, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it seemed like I felt bad for him.

He realized where he was at. He was like, I wasn't supposed to be here. I was supposed to be down there. I got to get out of here quickly because that's not a fun region to be in, folks. Don't take a vacation to the mountain jungles between Venezuela and Columbia. So if you look at those dynamics, I think, and then you look at it, what Singer wants, just to get paid, doesn't care if we ever develop in any further oil whatsoever. What does, there's doubts that the oil from the institutional interest and the resources

are really worth the risk from a lot of the big players. They would rather greenland other places go. Then you've got the geopolitical realist. They do not want boots on the ground. That's why, you know, the people, oh, and say who, but, you know, different people made sure that the Pentagon report got published before the Senate voted. And that Pentagon analysis, they battle tested, game, you know, game strategized, what would happen if we go into Venezuela. And overwhelmingly, it was the same outcome every time. Chaos, civil war, chaos, civil war, chaos, civil war, leading to massive drug flow increases, leading to even more problems getting any.

resources out of Venezuela, if that's the objective. Even bigger problems of illegal immigration that would ultimately lead to the United States. Bigger gain control. TDA's influence goes up, not down. So the geopolitical realists, I think, have the upper hand there. And there won't be. And then the Senate has already now voted. That report was the tipping factor, that getting published, that getting out.

To them, the Senate, I think to the surprise of many people, said no further including Senator Hawley, including Senator Young. So these are populist-oriented Republicans from the Midwest like Indiana and Missouri. And they said, no, we're not interested in this. So it went beyond just Rand Paul and, you know, Collins and Murkowski, who are just sort of independent, more independent senators than Republicans anyway, and Collins is up for re-election. So what that tells you is there isn't any support for boots on the ground in Venezuela. Will. And I think that both the donor class, the key donor that cares about this, he doesn't need that or want that because will boots on the ground increase his chance of getting paid? No, it probably decreases his chances of getting paid. So if you're a singer, what do you want? And if you're geopolitical realist, you're okay with this. You just want a stable Venezuela that can pay singer back. And you need a stable Venezuela to pay singer back. So I think what you will see. is no aggressive, despite all the big talk, I think, in fact, what you'll probably see,

the best way to get a singer paid back and the sanctions against Venezuela. I mean, people keep forgetting Venezuela wasn't running the deal of business with China or anybody else. We forced them to by sanctioning them and prohibiting them from distributing to the U.S. for the part. So if you just got rid of the sanctions, you could state, I believe, most analysts believe, you could stabilize the Venice well in economy. So Trump, and Trump now has political cover to pull back on those sanctions because Maduro's now in custody. So I think the most likely path forward, because it happens to align with the geopolitical realist and the particular donor interest at issue here, is that we don't continue to embargo them. We don't continue to chase down rusty, rusting ships across the ocean.

So we spent more money grabbing that chip, and that chip was even worth. So, you know, I think a lot of that you'll see recede. And that's the most like there's still a risk because the X factor in all this is the CIA just loves regime change. They love to show off. They love the visuals of FAA, FO, and all of that jazz. And you get HECSeth playing that game and the rest, you know, like Team America, World Police from South Park. You know, even Colonel McGregor was talking about. That's what it looks like.

You have that element. that would like to show off even more. But the other thing with Trump is, remember, he hates losing more than he even likes winning. So he is to now avoid a Black Hawk down moment. He's avoided a fall of Kabul, fall of Saigon moment. He knows he's at major risk of it from his own Pentagon reports if he puts boots on the ground in Venezuela.

And he knows a destabilized Venezuela undermines everybody's interests in the equation. So and the longer we do the embargo, the more we threaten to further intervention, the more we destabilize the country. So I think that he will likely do business with Delci Rodriguez. You might. Before she can come to the U.S., I would recommend she require a pardon because otherwise, you mean, she was one of the co-indicted people with Maduro. And so you look at all that. I think that's the most likely sequence of events is we actually just, we pull back on the sanctions. We pull back on the embargo.

we pull back on the military intervention talk, that he'll talk big about that for another couple of weeks until he gets her to sign on the dotted line. But once he gets her to sign on the dotted line, pulls back the sanctions, ends the embargo, normalizes relations, relatively speaking. Absolutely. Can I just make a quick point, just as it made sense for Russia to sell gas to Germany

and Germany to buy gas from Russia. So it makes sense geographically for Venezuela to sell oil to the United States and for the United States to buy oil from Venezuela. That is what the geography dictates. The geography is the single most important thing in international trade. Now, again, as a Greek who's had contacts with shipping, well, I know all about that. Just to say, you do not want to have to ship your oil all the way off to China, going to all kinds of places. It takes a long, long time to go if you could sell it much more quickly

by traffing it, sending it across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. It is obvious and it is simple and it is straightforward. Can we talk about this case now against Maduro? What did you think of the indictment? Why was it brought in the Southern District of New York? And is there any chance that he might be acquitted on this indictment? And are we going to see more charges brought? Because I would have thought there would be possible ways to put.

put together more charges. But what do you make of this? I mean, it's going to raise very unique legal issues that have only been raised once before in the United States at this scale. And that was the Noriega prosecution. So you have issues of personal jurisdiction related to not using the extradition treaty, the U.S. as with Venezuela. You have personal jurisdiction related to sovereign immunity as him being a recognized head of state during all of the relevant time periods, including his arrest, but also, as for most of the indictment, there's some parts of the indictment that implicate consular immunity because they allege that when he was the foreign minister, he engaged in things like giving diplomatic

passports to drug dealers, etc. So you have unique consular immunity, head of state immunity, and potential personal jurisdiction issues related to the manner and method by which the court obtained that personal jurisdiction over. namely what would appear by all definitions to be an illegal kidnapping. Despite the vice president and some other people's claims that you can America's arrest warrants apply outside the United States. They did not. No courts arrest warrants apply outside the territory of their jurisdiction.

There are at least some limits recognized by every nation elsewhere. And despite Stephen Miller and the Trump's own claims that there is no international law, international law comes from the Constitution of the United States of America. We call it the law of nations. It's specifically referenced in it. Well, why is that there, Stephen, if there's no such thing exists? I guess he skipped that part of law school class. The in between hating on Palestinians, which is his other great passion,

aside from illegal immigration, where he does good work on illegal immigration, but everything else, he's complete crap. So there's those unique issues. We have issues of whether or not it is shocking to the conscience, the manner and method by which the court has obtained personal jurisdiction. jurisdiction over him, such that it's a due process violation under the Constitution. We have the United Nations charter and whether or not the seizure of him violates that charter because it doesn't appear to have been necessary for self-defense to do so, and whether it's enforceable in U.S.

federal courts. And it would be very interesting for a federal court in New York to say that the U.N. charter for a U.N. that is located in New York has no application or enforcement when treaties are the supreme law of the land under our U.S. Constitution again. Then you have, so you got that set of legal issues. Then you have whether or not he's recognized as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention, which requires repatriation upon the cessation of hostilities, which of course apparently has publicly occurred. So currently we still have an embargo, so you could argue the hostilities haven't ended.

And then there's a sort of common criminal exception interpretation to the Geneva Convention, even though that language is not used in the third convention that's applicable here, of war. But how does that apply? People may forget, Noriego was designated a prisoner of war for the purposes of his trial at the beginning of that case. So those are the unique legal constitutional issues. Then you have the unusual set of charges. So you have a narco-terrorism charge, which if you listen to Marco Rubio, you might think he was selling drugs, that Maduro was selling drugs for the purposes of giving money to Hamas, Hezboa, and Iran. fact, Tamas doesn't exist in the indictment is not identified at all. Hezbollah doesn't exist

to the indictment isn't identified at all. Iran doesn't exist in the indictment isn't identified at all. And the so-called cartel of the sun, which anybody who knows the history knows the cartel of the sun was made up by the CIA in the early 90s just to refer to the National Guardsman because they had the sun on their on their badges, that the, even though apparently the Trump's message is like that famous line from that movie. Badges, badges, we don't even know stinking badges. Apparently, that's our defense in the Madero case. We went law, law, we don't even know stinking law.

So, but I mean, that was always made up. I always found laughable, poor dated Republican, this, you know, semi-autistic kind of doge reporting person who does some really great work otherwise, was completely convinced that the cartel of the sun really existed and was this massive cartel. Of course, the superseding indictment knew that they couldn't, have the cartel of the sun in the indictment because otherwise Maduro's first request would be for

discovery from the CIA about the long history of them creating the cartel of the son from the 80s and early 90s back when Venezuelan was on our side of the aisle. So that has been mostly gutted, but there's going to be unique discovery issues. People may remember when Mueller brought prosecution against that internet research agency that he claimed somehow had influenced the 2020 election that was Russian, assuming, nobody would appear, but the corporation can appear without an individual appearing. So they did appear in the case. They demanded all the discovery. Muller had to quickly rush to dismiss the whole case because he knew the discovery would expose what a fake, phony fraud case it was. And it would expose certain bad faith, deep state actions and actors. So there's unique discovery issues in this case because he's charged with narco terrorism. And the terrorism is simply that the very is because they've listed all the drug cartels now as foreign terror organizations. Now, there's a problem. They didn't list those cartels as foreign terror organizations for the most part until this year. And yet the indictment dates to long years before. So that creates its own legal complexity just for that charge. Then he's charged with importation of cocaine. Then what's, and then normally what you'd expect next is racketeering. You'd expect money laundering. You would expect a forfeiture action. For some reason, they don't want, they don't want to pursue that at all. No money laundering. allegation, no racketeering allegation, no forfeiture allegation. It's like they don't want people

tracking the money. They don't want to, oh, daggum and went back through Lingley again, you know, that routine. Then they charged two unique charges, which a lot of people in America found laughable, both, 1934 National Firearms Act, which was formed after the, you know, when the mob was using those machine guns on the street during the prohibition wars, that's what inspired that law, the first effort at gun control. That law, by the way, is currently facing constitutional scrutiny because it was sold as a tax law and thus was just regulating taxes. They removed the tax from it and the big beautiful bill. So gun rights organizations are challenging that very law. That law may get struck down as unconstitutional. And that would gut that provision. And what he's technically been charged with

is not owning machine guns. That's been the popular portrayal of it. It's owning machine. It's owning guns while distributing or using while using a gun while in the narcotics illegal narcotics distribution business. Which they have to identify the two. But the idea of indicting somebody because he's head of state and he has an army. Nobody's ever even, they didn't

they didn't think to bring that prosecution against Noriega because I laughable. So you've got huge, and if you read the indictment, huge factual issues. We talked to Max Blumenthal yesterday. He knows who the key witness is like. is against him and he's the former spy chief for Hugo Chavez who basically who's been making up

all kinds of stories claiming he knows how Venezuela rigged the 2020 election which is totally false. He wasn't even in Venezuela to rig the U.S. election. That isn't what happened. They stole it the old-fashioned way here in the United States in my opinion. So you've got big legal issues, big evidentiary issues, constitutional issues, treaty issues. Now, it goes to the first question you asked, why the heck the Southern District of New York? I was like to call it the sovereign district of New York. Where you've got Judge Hellerstein, it was like 92.

He's falling asleep on the bench all the time. He's handled, he got assigned all the Venezuela cases back in 2011. And that's why under the related case doctrine, he keeps getting the cases assigned. Now, the Southern District of New York is infamous for it being a deep, state court. With Trump twice tried to remove his state criminal prosecution there, this was the judge that screwed Trump over. There's other Trump cases, including the Alien Enemies Act, due process for illegal

immigration cases, others. The only consistency with Hellerstein that's been screw Trump, screw Trump, screw Trump, screw Trump, screw Trump. So yes, he's a deep state judge, known as a deep state hack, but he's also an anti-Trump judge. So how that's going to play out is anybody, and he's known as being wily and independent. Plus, a lot of these judges, especially the ones that are way too old to frankly be on the bench, tend to really over-rely on their clerks. And every federal judge has four law clerks. I guarantee you all every single one of his clerks is a pure Trump hater. And what better way

to embarrass Trump, to humiliate Trump than to dismiss a case against Maduro to say it's an egregious, shocking, conscious violation, the way in which he was seized, the way in which the president's behaving, the international law doesn't matter. So there's serious risk politically there. There's political risk at the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit is split seven to six in terms of its active judges, seven Democratic nominees, six Republican nominees. Most of those are Biden nominees, by the way.

They would be eager and happy to screw Trump. Third, in the old days, the Second Circuit used to be so deferential. the U.S. federal power and be a deep state court that you could trust them to ignore international law. They've had some of the worst international law decisions came out of the Second Circuit, but that's old. That's from the 60s and 70s and 80s. Since then, the Second Circuit is one of the few courts in the country to say just Cogan's norms are enforceable around the world, even against private companies for their actions across. So they've been willing, ready, eager to enforce, various principles of the law of nations, as our Constitution calls it, in federal courts there.

So it's not as clear that they're the favorable court. The logical court to have brought this. And then last but not least is the jury. They're already polling a majority of Democrats do not believe Maduro is guilty right now. So they already inclinement, the Luigi case, the guy who executed the United Healthcare Executive right on the streets, his case is in New York. In fact, he's almost cellmates with Maduro over there in the Brooklyn facility. They put him in the Brooklyn facility rather than Manhattan facility because I think they realized they put him in Manhattan where Epstein died. He killed himself.

That looked really a little bit bad. I visited both the facilities are horrendous. Arguably Brooklyn facilities worse. The question is whether the Geneva Convention will require them to treat him differently once the court adjudicates that question. But there's a significant risk of jury acquittal In part because it appears they have no real evidence That the evidence is a couple of it is this former Hugo Chavez Spymaster who's been caught lying all the time

Who hasn't even been in positions of power in Venezuela since 2014 Basically the whole time Maduro has been in power Doesn't really know Maduro, doesn't really have connections Doesn't really have evidence of that sort And is singing for his dinner as it's called Basically, he gets a massive reduction in his prison sentence, the more favorable testimony he gives the government against Maduro. Then we have a few other Venezuelan drug dealers.

And some people connected to Mashado, who I'm sure will testify too. Problem is they all appear to be incredulous because if they had any credibility, we would have more factual details in that indictment. The indictment is weak, week, week, and you have a jury pool that's anti-Trump that already thinks he's innocent. So there is a substant—there's a reason why in the prediction markets, they're saying 60% chance. Maduro gets acquitted of something. I would say that is accurate. In fact, I would say 60% chance plus that the cases are either dismissed or he gets acquitted of everything. That's how

weak the case appears to be. Wow. That is amazing. Can we talk about Iran? And there's two things. Obviously, there's lots of reports of troop movements and preparations for a strike against Iran, even as some reports suggest, reports I believe, by the way, that the actual protests in Iran are subsiding at the moment. The thing that really interests me, Pekne, is that he's now, Trump has just imposed 25% tariffs against every country that is dealing with Iran.

Or at least that's what he says. He says it's right away and it's irrevocable and it's the decisive decision. But there's very, very, very. little information. Now, every country that deals with Iran means the BRICS countries. I mean, is this, is this a 25, has he thought this through? I mean, what he's ultimately doing is he's applying, imposing a 25% additional tariff on every country that is a member of the BRICS. So that includes China, includes Russia, obviously. It includes India as well. It includes Brazil.

It includes Indonesia, which has recently joined the bricks, all important trading partners of the United States. As China, as we know, is a very important trading partner of the United States. I mean, does he know what he's doing? Has he thought this through? And all of this on the eve of a Supreme Court decision about tariffs, which, from our previous discussions, and from statements that he himself is now making, he will probably lose on the topic of tariffs. It is a very odd thing to do.

I mean, was this an angry reaction because the protests have faded? Or what was it? And what is the real risk of an attack on Iran? So it's the same people giving him his legal advice. that are the problem in all of this, because the legal advice, the person who represents the president before the Supreme Court of the United States,

the Solicitor General, is under the direction and supervision of Attorney General Pambandi. And he apparently has been told that if he would add a sanctions on Iran, that that would boost a chance, the Supreme Court rules his way when it is literally just the opposite.

So that's why you're suddenly seeing a rush. Oh, this will help. We save it. Okay. Yeah, 25%. See, we have Mr. C Supreme Court. I need these tariffs in order to protect the world and have let peace and freedom reign around the world. They will not motivate the Supreme Court at all. In fact, it will motivate them negatively, adversely. Oh, the Trump just doesn't have any understanding that there are constitutional constraints on the tariff power, that he won't recognize any of those limits. It actually undermines them. And by the way, that's part of the

objective, because the people giving him the bad advice don't like the tariffs. they want the tariffs to be held illegal. They want the tariffs to be. So this is why the CIA doesn't care if anything blows up in their face, like trying to murder Putin and all the rest, because they figured Trump will get to blame. So they figured to win-win, either they get to pull off the coup, they get to pull off the surprise attack, they get to pull off the assassination, they get to pull off the regime change, or if it goes south, it's Trump's fault. And they get one of their adversaries out, one of their people that they perceive as, as, as a major hurdle and obstacle to their agendas is diminished and discredited.

That's why it's always a win-win for them to give him the worst possible ideas because they don't think they will suffer the blowback. They think he will. So it's expected any day now, maybe even on Wednesday, tomorrow, but the Supreme Court will issue a ruling. The prediction markets are saying about a 70% chance he loses. I would say it's more like a 90, 95% chance. he loses. The only question is, do they order an immediate refund? They may, what they may do instead

is stay that part of the order and give Congress six months or so to retroactively greenlight the tariffs. This is one of the reasons he doesn't mind the 500% bone crushing sanctions on Russia, because my understanding is the law has been changed to be discretionary rather than mandatory. So it just gives them a tool that he might get to use for other purposes that don't even relate to Russia. That's what's behind that. I'll be very surprised if he act, there's a risk, but a small risk. He just goes forward and does something there. So, but it's a bad idea. Now, are we going to go into Iran? He has been letting people believe that this is all bluster and bluff, the people that are on the geopolitical realist side of the administration, people in the Senate and the

House. He's been saying, don't worry, I'm not going to put boots on the ground. Don't worry, we're not going back into Iran for that wing. While he tells Lindsey Graham and the others, yeah, I'm seriously thinking about it. And the, but so what he tells them is, hey, this is to try to, Trump is obsessed,

as you pointed out early on, Alexander would leverage, the perception of leverage. So he believes the strong bluster, gets, gets people to do whatever he wants. He should have learned from Maduro. That's really not true.

Maduro never folded. He had to physically go in there and get him and bribe the guy in charge of counterintelligence to have that even take go with the way it went, which we now know because that person has now been arrested. There was a lot of misinformation about secret weapons that, you know, where people were vomiting blood and all the rest.

I've seen no independent evidence of that. That struck me as a smokescreen so they wouldn't know that it was an inside deal that we were able to go in. Those helicopters don't go in that low unless they know there's no air defense is firing at them. So, and now that that person who was in charge of that aspect and counterintelligence in general is my understanding has been arrested by the Venezuelan authorities. So the, you know, just people remember. you can take bribes from the CIA they betray you in five seconds flat they leave you behind they left him

behind thinking he could further influence things like Venezuela and authorities wouldn't put this together but you know they abandon you in a heartbeat so that's the problem with ever trusted yeah you might get a fat bribe you're never going to get to spend it you're never going to get to use it more often than not just word of the wise

out there so the I think the chances and this goes back to an article not because of any sort of peace orientation, unfortunately. But Dumeberg, who's one of the top financial energy substacks in the world

over at substact, he wrote this after the June Iran attacks, said that Israel's defenses were so porous in their, you know, Hexeth was bragging foolishly about, oh, look, those Russian air defenses don't work. Yeah, they don't work when you bribe

the guy that's supposed to fire them. How well of those U.S. air defenses work against the Ereschnik that they sent. I was hoping to run into Ratcliffe when I was in D.C. Because that attack happened the day before, the last day I was there. And I was going to, yeah. Did your boys get out of Levivant time?

Since his boys running that and keeps promising there'll be no blowback. That's unbelievable. But that's another story for another day. So I think chance, what Duneberg said is the problem is simple. Israel has very vulnerable water and oil and energy supplies. in terms of internally, being able to keep the lights on, keep the water. Think just like what's happening with Russia and Ukraine as we speak. You know, that half of Kiev is going to be frozen out.

And the mayor's telling them you've got to head out. Israel's in the same problem. And he pointed out, Duneberg did, that if you looked at what was happening towards the end of that conflict, they were in serious risk of just literally losing the conflict because they couldn't provide clean water and effective energy to their citizenry. that the air defenses didn't work at the level that the Iron Dome and the other related defenses were supposed to. We have not been able to restock that at all.

Trump is now talking about nationalizing effectively aspects of the defense industry by limiting what they could do for stock dividends and corporate pay and all the rest because he sees Russia can scale up fast and we can't. So I think just geo, I think practically speaking, if we went back in, the biggest risk wouldn't be to the Iranian regime, it would be to Israel. So despite their big talk, I think it was still mostly big talk, believing that somehow that would lead to, because these people still believe in like,

I'm curious your thoughts on this, like something, I find it mind-boggling, but the idea is that it would be like at the end of the Cold War, that they can't wait for America to come in and free them from their oppressors and their tyrants and they're going to wave the American flag, and they're going to be chanting long live America, not death to America, and that all the Iranian people are just waiting for that one little extra tip.

And if we just say, we're with you, that will cause that extra little tip, even though that has not been true in a single place since the end of the Cold War, other than what happened to the Cold War. But there are people who think that. And I believe that is the most likely, put his way, that's what Trump has led people to believe, that are on the geopolitical realist side of the equation, is that he's not going back into Iran. we will see the same people who were like,

you never know for sure with Trump at the moment. There's a 5 to 10% chance he does it anyway. But that most of this was bluster and bluff, believing that somehow it would help regime change, when all it does is actually hurt regime change, even if you think you could have achieved it that way, even if you thought that was a desirable achievement, of which there's many evidence of which you guys pointed out for a long time.

regime change in Iran most likely leads to a chaos and civil war in Central Asia, which is a nightmare for every, everybody, China, Russia, Middle East and the U.S. I don't think we're actually going to go in based on, and I think probably Duneberg was right that until we come up with better air defenses for Israel, Israel is in no position to wage war with Iran. Well, on the subject of Iran, I'm just reading today in Reuters, it speaks of a sizable constituency in Iran loyal to clerical rule. So that's Reuters, which is, of course, as we all know, hand in glove with the British Foreign Office and MI6. So that's probably based on their own information. There is a critical mass of people in Iran who will not welcome the United States with open arms. There is apparently a security service there, security forces there.

The number around a million people, heavily armed. They've got some degree of training. It is a very, very mountainous country. It is a huge country. It would be incredibly unwise. To say unwise is not strong enough of work. It would be utter folly to invade Iran and to try and occupy a country of that size

against that level of opposition. I mean, it would be an absolute disaster worse than any operation that we have seen. Anyway, just a few things. Firstly, I was going to ask you whether the bone-crushing sanctions bill was partly a response to the Supreme Court decision, but you anticipated me,

and you've answered that question, and you've answered it fully. I hope you're right, and we don't get an attack on Iran. I think perhaps are right. I hope you're right. I will say that there are some people always who see to ache, for military action at every opportunity

and never worry about what happens the day after. But we should worry about what happens the day after in this case. I wanted to discuss something different actually, which is the situation in the United States itself. I mean, what is the situation like in the economy now? I remember we did a program back in the summer when already things are beginning to go sour with the direction the administration was taking.

And you were talking then about the fact that for many people, despite, you know, the GDP, strong GDP figures, the boom in Wall Street, all of that, for many, many people, the situation is not good. What is the situation now? Has there been an uptick? Are things better? Are they worse?

Well, we're getting as a disconnect between the GD, economy and the real economy of ordinary people. So you've seen the GDP, now some of it's artificial. Like the trade policy has worked to a degree at creating the incentive for import substitution. I always get a kick of people that will be in, you know, say America shouldn't be doing these trade policies and then celebrate Russia's import substitution policy. It's the same basic goal of the industrial policy either way. But it hasn't translated into manufacturing boom.

So we've got the imports coming down, that boosts GDP, but that's a little bit. artificial in the sense that it's not like we increased our actual production. We just reduced our dependency on foreign production, but we haven't replaced that yet with domestic production. And ever since 20, really this is I call post-pandemic economics, that the, as you guys discussed, you could not do a mass global experiment on the economy that way and not have unforeseen adverse consequences of some sort for the next two years, three years, five years, even 10 years because it distorted everything about the supply and demand of economics.

And I mean, like I represent almond farmers in California. They're completely still underwater years later because they couldn't stop growing almonds. So, but they had to stop selling them. So all that did is create a glut of supply that is still taking time to be able to, to create some equilibrium in the markets. You've got the euro dollar system, you know, that private banks issue the dollar around the world. the, and that's the, you know, Euro dollar just means outside the dollar, not related to the

euro itself, outside the U.S., rather, use of the dollar. And the, and you look at that the stress in Japan, that's extreme stress, stress in China because the real estate internal bubble, they've tried to maintain their production levels despite the trade war with the U.S. So they're dumping heavily into Europe. Now that's causing some tensions with Europe. And they're trying to balance that out while China tries to try to. transition to attack economy that might not ever occur there or anywhere. Then you've got global, like the reason why oil prices have stayed flat despite a lot of this or even declining, despite a lot of this instability around the world.

Usually if you had this kind of possibility of war with Iran, and I recommend people track those markets, you suddenly see a spike in the price. That means maybe oil Iran is something is going to happen. The other is just track prediction, the prediction markets, polymarket and calci because somebody's getting inside Intel. that like somebody put a huge bet that the Maduro was just about to get arrested the day before he got arrested that's some CIA guy or maybe even one of the maybe even one of the Navy team that went in there they're like yeah I make a little extra cash on this so you know that's good so monitor

those markets because they might give you a heads up uh but the independent of that you have but what you see is is a lack of demand for oil and when you see a shrinking demand for oil it's not so much a supply glut as lack of demand. And when global demand is declining, that's a sign of an economic decline incoming. So you've got that sort of global Europe, of course, is just anemic and almost zombie-esque in the way it's dying out economically. Russia is actually probably doing the best of anybody in the scale, relatively speaking, which is kind of ironic, given everything.

Their real wages are skyrocketing. Their employment situation is completely stable. They've been able to industrialize very effectively and at scale. So in the U.S., global market's bad. That's trouble for the U.S. Financial market's bad. That's trouble for the U.S. In terms of the liquidity,

what's called the repo market here, the overnight trading market, has been showing spikes. And those spikes, they kept pretending were related to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve chairman is under criminal investigation because he overbilled about a billion dollars or so on building a fancy taxpayer-funded new Federal Reserve building,

like with their own private fountains, and all this, you know, marbles here, marble there, all this kind of thing, then lied about it to Congress. And then when he got caught lying about it to Congress and got a subpoena this past weekend, he went out saying, this is outrageous. This is an insult on the independence of the central bank. As I point out, there is no independent central bank in the Constitution of the United States, nor has it ever served the interest of ordinary people to have an independent central bank, as well argued by both President Thomas Jefferson, who got rid of our first national bank,

and President Andrew Jackson, who got rid of our second one. And so you don't have to be full Ron Paul and the Fed to know the Fed has no constitutional place. But he went out and gambled that he could get the markets to sink by on Sunday night going out and saying, this is outrageous. This is an attempt to criminalize policy difference. Trump is out of control. And what happened on Monday, the markets stay fine. So they don't care about about somewhere between a third half, depending on where you get the estimate of our growth, growth in GDP. There's some estimates that there would have been no growth in GDP in 2025 but for AI. Problem is a lot of this is spending on things that don't create a lot of jobs.

In fact, they create a lot of problems. These huge data centers, they're creating zoning problems, problems for farms, local water and electricity demand problems. Michael Burry, famous of the big short, has been pointing out all the circular financing that goes on. So a $1 billion AI part of the economy would be this company takes the same hundred million gives it to that company, which takes the same $100 million, gives it to the next company.

And it goes like that. All of a sudden, $100 million becomes a billion dollars of investment, of KAPX investment. I experience, I don't know if you guys have on the law side. Like they said, it's going to replace half of lawyers in America. It makes stuff up. It hallucinates. The hallucinations built into the platform because all it is,

it's actually an old rush. I don't even remember that. There was a mathematics debate, way, back in old Russia between like a socialist and a you know one of the more of the czars guys about whether or not mathematics was proof of God in certain ways and the once one argued that in fact you could show why it wasn't if you will and basically it's the same sort of thing the LLMs are working on it's just guessing the next word it's not actually thinking it's more artificial and intelligence once you figure that out do you want that guy to do surgery on you

I mean, there's all these memes around. The robot saying, oh, you're correct. Your appendix was on the other side. We'll try to fix that now. You know, that kind of thing. So what if AI is a total bubble? And AI could be a stock bubble without even being a bubble of the technology. But you might have both.

What if that goes pop in the next three months or six months? The 10% of the economy or 10% of people own most of the stocks. They are almost all the consumer spending for the last year has been that top 10%. We've got record credit card to, We've got record used car loan defaults. We've got record student loan rebel default. Trump's starting to try to try to get housing costs down, trying to, you know, have them go in and buy mortgages to reduce the interest rate, try to stop Wall Street from buying up all the homes so that we can own nothing and be happy about it, W.EF style. Trump's going to be giving a big speech. What I heard was the speech is going to be counter what people are expecting. So that and that they expect this speech to be critical for his second year of a second year.

in term the speech he gives in Davos at the world economic forum so i'll be curious to see what that is but a lot of people said watch it will be different than what everybody's expected so we'll see but so uh major affordability issues in housing and health care in the united states uh they're probably going to extend the obamacare subsidies that because they almost have to because they have no other alternative solution uh there's good efforts that robert kennedy's doing to try to reduce health care costs by getting people healthier and a bunch of other things and i'm working with him on a couple of other really good ideas that could actually really reduce health care costs.

But for the time being, what you have is a very fragile economy. What I recommend people follow is three things to know how voters are going to feel. Look at the unemployment consumer sentiment survey going forward, what they think the employment situation will be for the next six,

12, and 18 months, especially amongst independent voters because they actually measure them by party. Right now it's at the worst it's ever been in the history of that survey. that they think unemployment and jobs is going to be really, really bad for the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. Whenever they have felt that, we have been in a recession within a year.

The second part is to track real personal disposable income. The Fed in Kansas City puts out a report that studies that on a regular basis. So that adjust for inflation. Still doesn't fully adjust for inflation because that's just the normal cost of living rate, not the cost of living rate for working class people, which has been going up higher than the normal cost of living rate because of the impact on food, housing, and health care and cars and their essential goods. And real wages. Follow those.

And then to a degree, manufacturing. Manufacturing has been in a two-year recession, jobs recession. It's supposed to get all these tax benefits kicking in for factory development, et cetera. This is where Trump's chaotic tariff policy has undermined the efficacy of his industrial policy, not only legally, by removing its legal justification, and the clarity of that legal justification. But also there's a bunch of people that don't want to invest if they don't know what's going to be the terror rate tomorrow. The whole point of industrial policy is predictability.

With these policies, Trump has removed that predictability, causing issues. So the economy, short answer, economy from a working class perspective, bad, bad, bad and looking to get worse, worse, worse. Interesting. I come back to a point we've made in previous programs. I don't understand why the people who've advocated tariffs have not gone back and looked at American economic policies

in the mid-19th century, extending all the way up to the 1950s. Because they would have explained that, obviously, you need a manufacturing industrial policy alongside a tariff policy. The two go together. And they would have explained how tariffs work and what you do with them and how the one policy can complement the other.

And no, industrial policy is not Soviet-style central planning, planting factories here and telling people what they should make, which is, by the way, what the Biden administration did. That was not what the United States did at all in the 19th century. It was setting up the entire industrial economic system in a way that was intended to facilitate development, entrepreneurial skill and production. And one of the ways they did that was by supporting demand,

by flattening, widening demand, so as to make people want to buy things, which it would be profitable to make and sell to them. That was why Henry Ford goes ahead and makes tea, model tea cars. That's why all of those things happened across the industrial culture of the United States and why they all worked incredibly well. And I just, I don't understand why people are not looking back at all of those lessons and all of this enormous literature that was produced in the United States at that time, which remains

completely valid. The one thing you should not be doing in this situation, well, I said not the one thing. One of the things you should not be doing, in my opinion, is increasing defence spending by another $500 billion. Because all that is going to do is going to suck industrial capacity out of the civilian economy, which is what you need to see grow, the industrial manufacturing, the civilian part in the manufacturing economy. And get them all building weapons, which of course will, in a situation like this, where demand is flat, it will simply create greater imbalances, more distortions in the economy, ultimately leading to higher inflation.

It's not difficult to understand this. I've read all this literature. It goes all the way back to Henry Clay and Hamilton, but it was massively developed in the late 19th century. And by the way, it industrialized a continent and changed the world. I just don't understand why people in the United States don't get this. Who came up with the idea of increasing defense spending in this colossal way? Has this been understood? Is this part of the military? industrial people or the donors coming along and saying, we know, you know, Raytheon, we need to increase Raytheon's production. Is this some strange idea of military Keynesianism? Because that is an extremely bad idea, by the way, that really isn't going to work at all. Or is this

to take on China and to outproduce China in fleet construction? Two things of that. What is the motivation and plan behind this. I've heard a lot of range of concerns from a range of people saying that this looks like a war budget and that's an understandable concern. It's not from Trump's perspective. So what's happened is, to your point, two things. One is Trump remembers and Susie Wiles, unfortunately,

remembers and misremembers, really, the 1980s deal that Reagan cut with Tip O'Neill, which is we'll keep welfare spending high and in exchange, we'll cut taxes and still run a high deficits because we'll spend a lot on the military. And they remember thinking of that as the military, as you pointed, military kensianism, as a jobs creation industry. And what Trump has been pushed,

is look, everything's flatlining and manufacturing. You know, we get manufacturing booming again. Well, peace through strength. We can just start doing, you know,

you don't have to wait for private sector to invest in manufacturing. If you're the one doing the manufacturing, Mr. President, let's get the defense budget up and roll. get those ships being built. He's got like four huge new, I think they're even called Trump ships or something. Everything's called Trump now. You know, he had the Kennedy Center's now the Trump Kennedy Center. God knows what. Nixon's going to be the Trump White House. He's going to put a big gold Trump sign outside. I'm just waiting for all of it to go full throttle. But the, that's how he's

been pitched. He's been pitched as this as, hey, you want to speed up the economy and manufacturing and industry. It's been another half a trillion on, just for a single year on the defense, manufacturing. But as you point out, the inefficiencies in our defense industry are horrendous. Trump thinks he can solve it by just saying, hey, executives, quit taking dividends, quit paying yourselves these big salaries, et cetera. Unless we actually nationalize the defense industry, that's not going to get very far. It's legal impact. The fact is very much in doubt. And some of these people are willing to take that trade off to get half a trillion dollars, knowing they can get it kicked back to them, you know, two years, five years, ten years down the road.

So that has been the main pitch. Now, the reason for these other people's pitch is, as you point out, that's not good industrial policy. In fact, it's more government inefficiency in a part of government spending that is already notoriously inefficient. I don't think the Pentagon has cleared an audit in like 30 years. I mean, just failed again the last audit. So what company gets to stay alive being failing every single audit for 30 plus? years where private company did that. They don't want to be bankrupt. Their executives would be in prison. But here we have continued to do it. So that's been the pitch that it's not to build up for war.

The entire pitch has been, this is how you can get manufacturing up and going. It just needs to spark, Mr. President, needs your spark, Mr. President. Let's spend a half a trillion dollars on it. And as you point out, as others are arguing, and there's ideas being proposed that the counter to this, is if the Supreme Court knocks down tariffs, go back to Congress with a, 20, say a 20% flat tariff across everything, which would be better anyway for a wide range of reason. And in exchange, eliminate the income tax for 90% of America, for the bottom 90% of tax of incomeers, basically create a standard deduction for a family of four worth a quarter of a million dollars. And we don't get much revenue from that anyway. And we get some, but basically the tariffs

would pay for it. So then you get the industrial policy on that side. And rather than taking that money and spending it on defense. Take that money and just give it to people. Just let them keep more of their own hard-earned labor and then let that. And what we need is you pointed out, you need broad-scale spending. The problem with relying on the top 10 percent is there's only, there's only, as Huey Long once said, there's only cars they can buy. There's only so many houses they can live in. There's only someone's food they can eat. There's only so many clothes they can wear. And he gave the old example of the picnic. He goes, once you have all of that, you got to bring back some of those vipans for the rest the people was all Huey P long back in the day. But you need with you end up with just disparate

luxury spending. You often have spending on foreign goods. There's only so many TVs rich people can have. So what you need is broad-based consumer spending to rebuild the manufacturing economy, to re-incentivize domestic production. And for that, you need to get money back into everyday people's pockets, which is politically more popular to begin with and doesn't have anywhere near the inefficiency of scale that the government spending in general does, but definitely government spending in the defense industry does. So those ideas are being countered currently. That's where Trump would probably benefit politically from the Supreme Court striking down tariffs, but not requiring an immediate refund and giving six months, is this set of policies would be much

more better, which I believe would be much better economically, but definitely would be a lot better politically. But you're right. It isn't to prepare for war. At least that's not the pitch being given to them. There might be other agendas of people of the Defense Department and Benegon, to be sure. There's people that think they can beat. I mean, if it's up to Lindsey Graham, we would be in seven wars at the same time,

just to prove how awesome we are. I mean, let's go to war with China. Let's go to war with Russia. Let's go to war with Iran. Let's go to war with Venezuela. Let's find another half dozen countries to invade or fight or whatever. Guys is insane. But the pitch to Trump has been an economic one,

and it's a counterproductive one. Absolutely. can I just say, I mean, the Reagan era, which can I remember very well, it was a completely different economic age. And whatever economic benefits the Reagan military buildup had, which are, I mean, they're open to discussion anyway. One thing one can definitely say is that it created imbalances in the U.S. economy. I mean, it widened the trade deficit at that time. In fact, the major problems with deficits, trade deficits. Trade deficits. and current account deficits really began in the United States in the late 1980s, again, because the enormous expansion in military spending and the diversion of factories into producing military goods meant that there were few goods, that they were producing fuel goods for the civilian economy. And that problem was mitigated then by all sorts of other factors, which don't exist today.

It's a very bad idea. Whoever's selling it to Trump. And I think he really needs to revisit it. There is still time. There is still space to reboot the economy and the administration and to turn things around. The pieces to do it, in my opinion, are all there if somebody just starts putting the pieces together. And doing it would be popular. of that I'm absolutely sure

and it would in a country like the United States you would notice the difference fairly soon I mean it would take a very very long time to turn things around in Europe if it's even possible but in the United States it is still possible but there isn't

an infinite amount of political time and that's what I wanted where I wanted to finish because I say he's got lots of balls in the air He's got Venezuela, he's got Iran, he's got tariffs to worry about, all of these things to worry about. He needs to start listening to the right people, not the wrong ones.

And he needs to make decisions consistent with his original program and not with that of his donors and of all of these other people who he's listening to far too much at the moment. So this is where I finish. I get a hand over to Alex, if there's anything more you want to. want to say, Robert, of course, you'd be saying it. But Alex, I'm sure he's some questions. We have a lot of questions for Robert. Yeah. Let me run through the questions for Robert and me and Alexander will dedicate another program, a Q&A program to answer all the remaining questions. So let me just try to find all the questions for Robert. Actually, let me start with locals because they've got a bunch of the local community has a bunch of questions for

Robert. Ikedo Debedo says doesn't Lenin's end stage of capitalism is imperialism and Rasa Luxembourg's socialism is or barbarian

or barbarism ring true for today. I think aspects of it, but I see what's happening is more the death of an empire than the beginning of one. I understand Tiger Carlson's point

that rhetorically we're now adopting the language of empire rather than Republic and the risks and dangers that poses. But I see it is what Paul Kennedy talked about 30 plus years ago when I was at Yale, which the, what, you know, in he, it was a very nice guy, by the way. There was a funny, there's a whole bunch of stories with him, but basically everything that was had was already happening at the beginning of

an end stage of empire. And you're almost seeing like this sort of micro, I think Alexander you called, you know, another author you referenced called it a micro-military, terrorism, that sort of thing. It was Emmanuel Todd. It was Emmanuel Todd who said it. Yes. And it does feel that way, especially for someone with some of the insecurities of somebody like Trump. It's Trump's insecurities are manifesting the insecurities of a dying empire. And in their dying days, there's going to be, is when they're the most dangerous,

unfortunately, because they tend to lash out. They tend to be more irrational. They tend to do things that are counterproductive. They tend, because they either live in an illusion and delusion of power, they no longer hold or because they recognize their power is shrinking and then lashing out can do irresponsible and dangerous things. But it feels to me like more the death of an empire, which I'm all for. I want us to return to our constitutional republic roots. But these people that are running around saying maga in America first means being an empire

have never read. I mean, I get, I'll give Trump credit. Turns out it wasn't the Monroe doctrine. He was bastardizing because the Monroe doctrine was against regime change, period. it, including for the U.S. to do it. For those people that keep misquoting the Monroe Doctrine, please read it for the love of God. But he said,

no, no, no. It was his mentally disabled brother, little known brother, Dunrow. Dunrow Doctrine is the one that President was following. And so that at least explains what this nonsense is. Nikki Ball says, Kramer says Trump has a secret mission to destroy

money laundering offshore banks in the Caribbean and Canada. Is there any evidence for this? Also, Max Blumenthal claims the Trump family are doing their own laundering through their own cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to contribute through taxes to the neoconsionist Fabian world conquest. I understand where Max is coming from, but that is not my general impression. So I would separate out there is an aspect of the stable coin component that the Trump brothers and Trump organization may profit from that may have a power component.

We did a long interview with Brent Johnson of the dollar milkshake theory on the way in which stable coin operates. For example, it's a lot easier to seize tether than it is to seize Bitcoin, for example. I think, I forget it was. Somebody just figured this out. Oh, it may have been, maybe been Maduro, but the had money and tether, maybe somehow, something like that. Right. Yeah. Money and tether and they shut down the wallets, yeah.

Correct. That's much easier. The stable coin is tempting to have dollar supremacy through the digital format. How easy that will be is a whole other story. But I don't see. But all these other connections are not. The problem is they're not directly connected to Trump. Because if Trump had understood what some of these deals were, he would have understood

that the oil wasn't going to be this big profit source in Venezuela. It's kind of the problem almost. It's things that are outside of his area of expertise. But he knew the Fed was over billing because he understands residential construction. God bless Trump. People forget Trump was not very active in the equity markets ever. He was never very active in tech. He was never very active in old.

oil. So these are things that he can get tricked and tricked and hoodwinked on because he doesn't understand the natural actual economies of those things. That's how some of these things like the defense industry, boom. If he understood the defense industry operated or had ever been involved in industrial manufacturing at scale, he would know this is a ridiculous idea. This is just going to enrich a few bogus pals. So that's my own view. Now on the, there's a derivative of Lyndon LaRouche, people that have this theory that everything Trump is doing is 4D chess to take out the city of London through the offshore banking. And I'm sorry, I'm not buying that story at all.

Just that's definitely that. From Akito, D.B.D.O. Robert, what do you say about Trump dropping the investigation into Butler, PA assassination attempt? All part of the same time. So it was all part of this pushed by Pampanning the Deep State group. And my understanding is he was misled into believing that investigating deeper could cause international rifts that would cause other issues that could lead us into potential war. That was one of the excuses used on Butler and on the Ukraine-connected assassin.

So he was misled and lied to about that. It's going to come back here. It's going to come back to is my belief. The, who he wasn't, you know, the Butler assassin wasn't hanging out with people from Iran. He was hanging out with FBI people at the time he was doing those, going to the shooting range, with a bunch of FBI and other Department of Defense, people, people like that. And the kind of training he had reflected that. But yes, he was convinced that he shouldn't investigate further or it would be bad for the country.

Kind of like what Lyndon Johnson did. So Lyndon Johnson was complicit with the CIA and the murder, in my opinion, of President John Kennedy. But Lyndon John is like, how did he get all these people to play ball, including Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren? He got him to play ball by convincing him the Russians really did it. He was like, hey, we can't investigate any connections. We got to say he's a lone assassin because if we don't, we'll be in nuclear war with Soviet Union. You don't want that.

Chief Justice Warren. So you got to play. That's how he got everybody to play ball at covering up his crime. Same kind of scam being run here. From Boa Omega 22, do you think Canada gets absorbed into the USA willingly or otherwise? Well, I occasionally mean it is a... Due to needed resources in the USA. Meeman is a joke.

Now, he would like Alberta to secede and us to grab Alberta where the real oil resources are, though their oil is kind of like a lot of the crude oil that's from Venezuela. So it's kind of interesting how all that's supposed to work. But we'll see. Realistically, no, we're not having Canada. I mean, I do as a joke, I say we should, you know, like the South Park movie, invade Canada. There was an old South Park movie about that. Along with, I guess we're taking South Park scripts and we're deciding to see what it looks like if you play it out in real life.

kind of like the Biden administration said, let's take Orwell's 1984 and V for Vendetta and combine the two. And we'll have Biden do a speech that looks like the V for Vendetta background. And we'll have Zelensky do a speech that looks like the Orwell 1984 background. Apparently somebody in the Defense Department, CIA, say these South Park has got good ideas. We got Team America World Police and we got invade Canada. So we joke about, you know, take over Canada to port all the people from Toronto to the UK to balance out their popularity. there in England and let Viva Fry come in and be a dictator of Canada. But realistically, no, we're not going into Canada.

All right. From Fuzzy Balls. Question for Robert. All the American banks switched to long positions on silver and the European banks are stuck on short positions. Does he think America planned this to destroy Europe? Personally, I think that's mostly just a product of the silver supply glut that are shortage that has occurred. And then you have, I think, broadly writ large, that you have

global concerns in the investor class and amongst a lot of central banks around the world outside of the U.S. European system concerned with all these sanctions policies. And that's where you're seeing a shift to gold and to some degree silver is a knockoff on that, but gold in particular. I mean, gold has now replaced the U.S. dollar as the primary reserve asset of banks outside of the United States and Europe. And look at how Russia played this. Russia's stockpiled gold between 2014 and 2012. So when their $200 or $300 billion was seized by Europe, the inflation in gold, which was heavily tied to those very sanctions, was worth more. Their gold increased more in value than the amount of money they lost that got taken from them. So they ended up net plus on the ledger because of that.

And they get to use the political lever of, hey, look at how they stole and seized our assets. assets to encourage countries to join bricks, to accelerate the timing of bricks, which the goal again for bricks where people who haven't followed is not an alternative currency, but an alternative mechanism and method of doing financial transactions. The goal is to be outside the SWIFT system and things like that, more so than having the ruble or the wand or anything else to replace the U.S. dollar. Because there's problems with having your currency being dominant. Everybody thinks of it as a privilege. There's also a price that comes with it that's not always desirable. particularly from domestic manufacturing perspective.

So, yeah, that's my take on it. Rula Bayadne says, how do people like you know that foreign policies of neocons, like regime change and wars, can turn into other disasters, but neocons themselves don't see it? Well, I call them criminal thinkers. So there's often, you'll see studies that show that criminals have low-tested IQ. And I always point out, caught criminals have low IQ. the because they're in what they're really measuring and measuring that IQ because I'm otherwise a skeptic of IQ as a measurement of much of intelligence but they're what they're really measuring is one what I call one step thinkers and there's people who look and say oh look at that purse I'm going to steal it and they don't have the second step how do I get away with it that this isn't there neocons are one step thinkers oh I'm just going to grab that and they don't think how do you get away with it well what happens next it's like the end of the movie candidate with Robert Redford and he goes what after he sold out all his principles and policies now just to get elected. And he's like, what now? I mean, what next? The, the, the,

as you guys have pointed out, the only, the, if you look at a neocon designed car, there is no break in there. All there is is is an accelerator. That's all there is. And that's all these people know. And it's because they have not faced personal or professional consequence for all the horrendous consequences of their horrendous decisions for three decades. Sparky says, Robert, in D.C., did you get word to President Trump here? He's being misled by people around him, like Colonel Klink being misled by Hogan's heroes. Being a boomer brought up on TV, this might click with him. Knows that about Bondi in particular.

With Trump, you have to focus. If you try to do too much, it will get too distracted. So the message was planted that Ratcliffe was an unreliable person. And the people working with Ratcliffe were unreliable at a minimum. That whether it's Ratcliffe's fault or the people working underneath. him, somebody is deliberately and consistently misleading him, and that will lead to trouble. But there, all you have to do is predict something different than they predicted and say, here's what I think is going to happen versus what they're saying is going to happen.

And then they get to see in live time that your prediction was right and their prediction was wrong. And it destabilizes their confidence in them. But the main message was an organized message that said, Pam Bondi is a serious problem that is a hindrance. Oh, you look at trade policy, you look at foreign policy, you look at our legal policy, all of it is being sabotaged most consistently by one person, and that's Pam Bondi. Jumping Kobe says Trump's natural instinct is neocon. He blocks out anyone who gives good advice, what he said of MTG and Gabbard showed his true colors. I think that my own view is,

I disagree with that assumption. So I get where people are coming from when they see these neocon policies. Two things with that. One, go back to his whole campaign in the lead-up 2016. the if his instincts were a neocon why did he take major political risks calling for george w bush's impeachment and supporting it uh condemning the all the different wars that took place why uh saying why don't we get along with putin when putin had a one percent approval rating amongst republican voters at the time those are all unnecessary political risk for him to take if he has a if his instincts are our neocon deep state instincts i think his instincts are twofold he likes to appear strong and he hates to lose and hates embarrassment.

And I do think he has, if you look at how he likes to do these interventions, he still likes to do them with minimal boots on the ground, with minimal death of U.S. soldiers or casualties. Like that, like, all the back 2017, attack in Syria, hits an empty airfield. Even these attacks on Iran that the U.S. was directly involved in, just hits a couple of bases and he's out of there. And if he was true neocon, Masado, he'd be trying to install Machado as president of it as well.

So those that try to read Trump as ideologically and instinctually indistinguishable from George W. Bush, I think are still misreading him. And they're underestimating how much things are in flux and how much they can still make a difference. Because I think if you assign, hey, Trump's just a pure neocons, always going to be neocons, always going to be empire. it deceives you to not being politically active or engaged. And from my being up there, it's still a wide open, it's the most wide open town. It's been in my lived history dating back to,

I first went to D.C. in 93, working as an intern in the Clinton White House. So the, so I disagree that he's instinctually a neocod. I think he's instinctually, uh, doesn't like intervention because he thinks it, not because he's a peace president,

but because he thinks it backfires more often than pays off. And if you track Trump's interventions, they tend to want to minimize the U.S. casualties. And it's hard. Neocons don't care at all about U.S. casualties. They don't care how many U.S. casualties there are. And that is a big difference between Trump and them. Here's one critical of Robert. Let's see.

Shinoville says Barnes is losing credibility saying the Epstein files exonerated Trump. This is what I mean by that. So if the Epstein files incriminated Trump, it would be incriminating Trump in money laundering, incriminating Trump in arms trafficking, incriminating Trump in human trafficking. It doesn't do any of those things when the only thing the Democrats can find is a photo of him with a bunch of models from one of the pageants. And then they redact the photos of them to make it look like he was embarrassed in the files. That tells you that there's nothing there. So the end, then you can just read the files yourself. Epstein is spending a ton of time between 2016 and 2019 trying to find dirt on Trump.

Why is he doing that if Epstein already had all the dirt on Trump? And so I think, so that's what I mean by it exonerates him. He is not incriminated in the human trafficking, arms running, or money laundering. And you can see that because Epstein himself is trying to find something he didn't already have. I just add something to that, which is that people consistently forget that for four years, the Epstein files were controlled by the Biden Justice Department, who were trying to prosecute Donald Trump for every kind of sin under the sun. If there's anything really, really that they could have used in the Epstein files,

either to prosecute Trump or to discredit him, surely they would have used to. I agree. Sparky says, Robert, President Trump's first anniversary of his second term will be nice, neat time for him to clean house and have some in his admin, pursue other opportunities and spend more time with their families. And Sparky also says, Robert, will Greenlanders be thrilled with Obamacare if not? Perhaps the publicity will plant the seed for the true health care reform. Trump really, really, and the people forget, this was like Venezuela. It goes back to his first term because people made the joke about putting a Trump post. hotel on Greenland and Trump made out the joke. Oh, don't we. I'll never do that to Greenland.

He's wanted it since then. It's never been crystal clear to me. Why? I know that a bunch of the donor class has bought huge interest connected to developing rare earths and putting AI data centers in Greenland. Like they think AI data is the perfect place to put AI data centers because of the automatic, you know, you don't have to about cooling it so much, which is a major expense. And that you You don't have to worry about ticking off farmers or anything like that. So I get it. You know, that assumes that there's going to be this AI boom that I'm not convinced of at all.

So there's that aspect. And they're thinking AI robotics can make it easier to mine the rare earths in Greenland because right now it is a logistical nightmare to try to mine those rare earths in Greenland. So I, but Trump is really truly deeply committed to buying up Greenland and having his territory. Problem is that could be a money pick. people forget Denmark spends a bunch of money to have people live there. You know, just to have this, I mean, it's almost like a vanity piece for Denmark

because it's never been crystal clear to me what Denmark gains from this. My understanding is they spend more money on Denmark than they get from Denmark. So why wouldn't we get stuck in the same boat? So if the AI development and the rare earth development doesn't happen, then, you know, I get we control some shipping routes and I know he's obsessed with shipping both the Denmark canal and the shipping routes around Greenland. it was, as you pointed out, Alex, is saying, we don't want Russia as a neighbor. We've had Russia as a neighbor for a long time, but, you know, is that why I met up there?

That's the whole point of the tunnel, I thought. So the, that's clearly how it's been sold to Trump for national security, industrial policy, and that China has reinforced that because of how China has played their rare earth's card. So that accelerated in his mind, we got to go get rare earths. We got to get them now. and let's get them in places where developing them won't cause local political backlash because of how dirty it is, environmentally dirty it is, to truly develop rare earth in the current way. But chances are within the year, we have bought Greenland from Denmark.

So if you're in those prediction markets, I recommend that wager, about 65% chance. This year, we buy Greenland. we won't need to militarily invade. I think they could. We're already there anyway. Our military base is already there. So I'm not convinced this is going to be a great deal for the U.S., but Trump is. Yep.

John Roberts says, Are the recent announcements of the 50% increase in the defense budget and the prosecution of Fed Chairman Powell related? Does the Trump admin need to get Powell out of the way to spend more? Powell only has limited influence. There is most biggest influences on interest rates. And Trump has been deeply. unhappy with Powell about that. But the referral to Powell came from Congresswoman Luna.

Congresswoman Luna is doing really good work on the peace front involving U.S. and Russia, exposing all of the Ukraine wrongful persecution of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine. She's taking the lead on that. Demetriv has met with her. Other people have met with her. So Luna's the one who's skeptical of the Fed in general. And she's the one who referred Powell for prosecution for lying to Congress about what was happening with the building all the way back in the summer. So I don't think there's an actual correlation. And the only reason they issued even a subpoena was because the Fed was refusing to respond to any inquiry or request. And the reason why that accelerated last week, well, it might have related to some of us being up there and saying that

these things need to move forward. And Bondi started feeling heat. And so she was like, okay, at least issue a subpoena. Uh, to be Powell will not get indicted until Bondi is removed because she's been the one running interference for the Fed for the last six months. But his role on interest rates is a, uh, does not correlate to the interest of defense bending because the people that love the Fed also love defense spending. I just want to quickly say here. I mean, what I saw of the case about, uh, Powell, I mean, I think, there is an actual case. I just wanted to say that. I mean, this is, I know this has been packaged in the media here in Britain and elsewhere as a political case. It looks to me actually like a real

case. I'm not jumping to conclusions about, you know, whether he's going to be found guilty or not guilty or what, but it does look as if there's a case to answer, a real case to answer. Nick Smith says, thanks. Yep, go ahead, Robert. Oh, as you say, it's been a big problem for the Fed now for the last 20 years. They keep getting caught inside her trading. There's the one he tried to fire because she committed mortgage fraud, mortgage fraud. On the Fed, mortgage fraud. So they've just gotten greedy and dumb over the last 20 years.

Mitch Witts says, thanks Robert for being a regular guest. And thanks to you, Alex, Alexander, and Robert, to bring always something insightful to the viewers. Thank you for that. And Fuzzy Ball says, question for Robert. Does America view the EU as anything other than a customer of the M-I-C? it seems America does not care about the economies of EU countries. That's where there's a split between neocons and neoliberals. Neo-liberals are very pro-Europe.

That's why they were shocked that Trump didn't justify the military intervention of Venezuela on humane, democratic grounds. They wanted Mashado in there and all that. And some neocons did, but a good number of neocons understood that was not practical or pragmatic. And they don't really care about Europe. The new geopolitical realist school that is coming, that is rising in, that it'll have been influenced by the people like Mearsheimer and Kennedy and others that are reflected in office right now, Elbridge Colby and J.D. Vance and originally

Michael Anton, that wing of geopolitical realism sees Europe as a hurdle, sees Europe as a barrier, sees Europe as an anchor around America's leg that's dragging them down, and sees Europe as anti-American. So they see the censorship efforts as anti-American. They see the censorship efforts as anti-American. why Europe gets the idea to double down on going after Elon Musk in the middle of this. That's probably one of their d. political moves they could make, but they keep doing it. The interfering and interrupting elections. J.D. Vance's early speech that he made to Europe early on the administration really represents the,

I would call it not Eurocriticism or Euro, but Eurosceptic. They're very Euro skeptic that we should be engaged there, that we should be tied down there, that we should have military or financial resources invested there. they see it as not just sort of foolish, but counterproductive to U.S.'s own economic interest. And otherwise, a lot of them could really care less about Europe. It's not their anti-Europe. They just don't think American resources should be put at risk for Europe. All right.

We'll do a couple of more, and then we'll wrap up. And once again, me and Alexander will answer all of the questions in a dedicated Q&A from Priscilla Vasia Perez. Trump changes his mind according to the last person he speaks to. Will Machado change his mind when she meets with him? The very unlikely because even Rubio knows, here's my understanding. Rubio doesn't really care about Venezuela. He's got a personal dislike of Maduro. But his whole goal, as has now been they've made public, has been Cuba regime changing Cuba. That's been his, that's been his life's obsession has been Cuba. I mean, Trump was joking about him being the next

president of Cuba. They believe cutting Cuba off from Venezuela will work, but they want it to be a steady regime change, not a sudden regime change, because they don't want to deal with the chaos. That's why they didn't oppose Mexico shipping oil to Cuba. So they want Venezuela and cut off in terms of reliability for Cuba, but then they want a slow, steady transition out of the existing government, but don't want a sudden collapse because they're worried about what that looks like and that somebody might more hardcore might come into power in Cuba, for example, than the current regime is. So that's what's going on with Rubio at Cuba.

Yeah. John 9378 says a Pulte 50-year mortgage when the average home buyer's age is 40 is not a winning plan for the young people. And he's still getting heat for that, by the way, inside the administration. There's a bunch of people like, could you please vet those ideas throughout before you share them with President Trump. But to the question, as you guys point out, that Trump can be influenced by the last person to talk to him. I just think there's a universal agreement that Machado is that's not feasible in Venezuela.

So apparently she was going to try to give him Nobel Peace Prize, which the Nobel Committee pointed out, that was not actually a transferable transaction. But I suspect he's there because he wants Trump is the kind of person to let her humiliate herself and still not give her anything. So you're like, yeah, give me the Nobel. That's mine. Thank you very much.

on my pocket. I think that's what you're going to see. The hockey goalie says, sorry if already asked. Could taking Greenland be part of a wider U.S. strategy to geographically isolate Canada in addition to the mineral benefits? It's more excluding China and Russia and controlling those shipping routes than it is encircling Canada. But people pointing out we are encircling Canada. I truly don't think that's the main objective there. And Sparky says, Robert, two months. Much industry consolidation took place in the last 50 years. Innovation comes primarily from small, medium, and regional businesses. Break up monopolies and trusts and end the war on small

business. And there's people in the administration who get that crystal clear. And the only reason it hasn't happened. Like Gail Slater at the any trust division is fantastic. Top notch, very bright, put together a great team. Pam Bondi and using Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz, who are lining their pockets, have basically completely sabotaged and derailed all those. efforts. And in order to restore a robust antitrust division to do precisely that, unleash economic enterprise, make things more affordable, create more incentives for innovation. You not only need to capitalize those with how you handle small banks and credit institutions, but the other key aspect of it, long American true free market capitalism built into the foundation of our country

was opposition to monopolies. And we need to restore that. The only way we're going to restore that is removing Pam Bondi as Attorney General. Yeah. And, uh, Dirty Dangle says Trump's cheap appeasement of MAGA's real values by being openly cynical instead of morally right feels good in the moment, but is disastrous in the long term. We're here for the oil. I love the honesty. I love democracy. Democracy. When I hear we ever know democracy. So I do love Trump's honesty in that regard. I don't have to deal with all the BS and all the crap. But as Alexander's pointed out, there's certain, there's reasons why you do use that language to have some degree of perceiving. restraint on your conduct globally. Like, I don't mind him saying bluntly there for the oil. I do mind Stephen Miller saying, oh, Mike makes right around the world. Okay, that's not a function. One, that's anti-constitutional. The whole point of the rule of laws that Mike doesn't make right. And in the constitution itself is the law of nations and the reference to law of nations to Congress

creating and how it can be enforced and so forth. But we have long respected these rules and precedence. I know Putin gets a lot of heat from within Russia for his autist support of the rule of law. But it's not based on idealism. It's based on realism. That if you look at world history over a long period of time, I mean, I think you do the very good example, Alexander, of what happened to Athens when it adopted that mindset. It's a very quick perilous path to self-destruction to abandon those forms of the rule of law as a method and mechanism of self-restraint. Great live stream. I would just quickly. Just very quickly add to that, that international law that we have today is largely an American creation.

There's a whole succession of absolutely great jurists who basically, American jurists, who develop the whole concept and philosophy and principle of international law. The UN Charter, for all its many flaws and for all the questions you may have about whether or not you should even exist at all. But it is in spirit something that you would understand American lawyers of the early 20th century would come up with. And it was mainly them who did. Absolutely. I mean, the doctrine of self-defense is the only justification for the invasion of a foreign nation is an old American doctrine. Arguably, the Second Amendment codifies it. And so the abandonment of it so publicly is not something I favor.

And the right of self-determination, which planted a bolder. under the European colonial empires, which exploded and said that they all collapsed within about 20 years. The revenge says the Maduro kidnapping was good geopolitically. Legally, it is bad. No jurisdiction over foreign leader. Maduro could get Scotis original jurisdiction. Yeah, we'll see if the Supreme Court never ruled in the Noriega case.

And what they've ruled in these past cases is that illegal kidnapping is fine for personal jurisdiction, even if it contravenes an existing extradition treaty, as long as that extradition treaty did not have a specific prohibition on those. That's why in the Assange case and others, I was encouraging people to cite the U.S. courts failure to follow and enforce those treaties in a meaningful way as reasons not to extradite people to the United States, that those courts should start saying unless the U.S. respects those treaties, those courts don't have to respect those treaties. In a way of enforcing those treaties is to force the U.S. courts to do so.

But there are unique factors with Maduro that were not present in a Noriega case. For example, Panama did not support Noriega in his defense. Venezuela likely will. And so we'll see. And then the politics has massively shifted since the Noriega case. So that's why there's a substantial risk more so than most are assuming or would naturally assume that Maduro either the case gets dismissed or he gets acquitted because there's good legal grounds. but the politics that make that law enforceable, possibly enforceable, is very different than what it was to refer to Noriega. And Dangle says this is disastrous because once the gloves are off, they're off. If the public embraces removal of the mask, so will those who seek totalitarianism. It could move things into actual conflict.

They never give yourself power you wouldn't want your enemy to have. Yeah. And the hockey goalie says security of sea lanes can't be the reason, as Denmark is in NATO, Greenland covered by Article 5 in the U.S. put more bases there already. Very true. I agree. It's to, I think for Trump, there's a little bit of vanity there. And Trump says, see, I got it in Greenland. I had the territory for a spread, but I think that's a lot of the motivation for him. For the donors, they really believe if they had complete control of it, they would be able to extract the resources to their exclusive profit, not have to share it with Denmark, not have to deal with Denmark regulation on things like environmental pollution,

for example. That's what's happening with the donor class. And the geopolitical side, once the control for shipping route purposes. Yeah. And the final question, Robert, for you, what do you think of Vance's chances of becoming potous becoming the next? Well, Vance really gets it. Vance gets the geopolitical realism. Vance gets the risk, understands that. Vance gets what's happening domestically politically politically. You saw him assert a lot more influence last week on that side, you know, put out of, you know, not allow banks to charge more than 10% interest on credit cards, required not allow Wall Street to buy any more private housing stock of the private residential stock you know have a fraud assistant attorney general that put all these cases under control

all of that came was basically from Vance and he's accelerating because he understands what the political issues are that implicate the legal side of the equation so you look at that combination Vance gets it the question is can he have enough influence that the president avoid some disastrous foreign policies that could completely derail his efforts at 2028. If he can achieve the latter, then I think he is the favorite to win in 2028. If he's unable to be the Trump whisperer and Trump continues to let the CIA run his U.S. foreign policy, continues to let Pam Bondi run the Justice Department.

Then I think his chances are substantially reduced, unfortunately. All right. On that note, we will end this live stream, a fantastic live stream. Thank you to everyone that joined us. Thank you to all of the questions as well. questions for Robert and for Alexander. Robert, before we let you go, where can people follow your work? Yeah, so for all the law politics and geopolitics analysis and for a board, almost as good as the Duran.orgals.com. I got plenty of the merch at home. The, it's at Viva Barneslaw.

Dot locals.com for any of the prediction markets involving what the Fed is going to do, what's going to happen in the Hungarian elections. Good story up by Max Blumenthala Grayzone about the EU trying to already rigged those elections against Victoria. Bob. That's at Sportspix.orgals.com and for anything, for any fun trolling on the internet, that's at Barnes underscore Law on X.

And all those links in the description box down below. Thank you, Robert, for joining us on another epic live stream. Thank you very much, Robert. Thank you again. And thank you to our moderators in the chat as well. Take care, everyone.