The Duran Podcast - Russia-US rapprochement begins in Saudi Arabia w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Russia-US rapprochement begins in Saudi Arabia w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Okay, we are live with Alexander Bacchurchase in London and joining us this evening, evening time here in Greece. We have the great Robert Barnes. Robert, how are you doing? Where can people find you? All right. Oh, it's good to be here. If you want the legal and political content, that's at Viva Barnes Law. Dot locals.com. If you want, we got some political bets. Had some people trailed. They made a lot of money this past November. They made money when Joe Biden decided to pardon his entire family and Anthony Fauci and everybody else. We had bets on that.

If you're going to have a corrupt president, at least you might as well cash in on it. We got some bets up on the German elections, on the Romanian elections, up at sportspics. Dotlocals.com. If you're interested in that side of the equation. Oh, we also have some Champions League bets. Alex's analogy last week when he was comparing countries or nations or ideas to like the Real Madrid or Manchester City of football.

They'll be playing today. A point in fact, it probably wasn't an hour or two there at the Bernouvao and in Madrid. But it's the one language the whole world does speak is football. But yeah, it's been an eventful a couple of months here in the States. Yes, it has.

Eventful. I'm the statement of the century. I will have those links where you can follow Robert in the description box down below and as a pinned comment as well. So a quick hello to everyone that is watching us on locals, the durand.locals.com on Rumble, rockfin Odyssey and YouTube. And a big shout out. Hello. And thank you to our moderators on YouTube. So Alexander Robert, I think we have a lot of news to get to today.

So let's just jump right into it. Absolutely. And I'm going to say straight away, I think we are in a middle of a revolutionary change. I know there are some people who still want to pretend otherwise. But, I mean, the events of the last couple of weeks since the inauguration have been extraordinary. And it's important to say the election itself was extraordinary. It came as a shock here in Europe. If you've been listening to Robert Barnes,

if you watch the program we were privileged to do with him just before the election itself, he predicted the outcome. He predicted it exactly right. I think that's something to say. Most people that I spoke to in Britain after we did that program said, you know, this cannot be true.

The polls are showing that Kamala is going to win. It's clear that she's going to win. going to win. At least if she doesn't win, it'll be because of problems in the electoral college. But she's certainly going to win the popular vote. It didn't turn out like that at all. It was exactly, exactly, as Robert Barnes said. And, well, we then had a very complicated and difficult transition period. We had Joe Biden still there. We had Jake Sullivan and and Blinken continuing to run things. They were lobbying missiles into Russia.

They were Trump-proofing, as they said, aid for Ukraine. They were continuing to the extent that they could continue with the law fair, even though after the election, that started to get very unstuck. And Jack Smith, I think, is the most appalling prosecutor in the history of time, just saying. So all of that still went on, but none of us, none of this prepared us for what came, because on the 20th of January, Trump became president of the United States. And since then, the pace has been astonishing.

And we've seen change at a speed that no one could have anticipated and of a radicalism and of a debt that no one anticipated. And I have to say this, Trump himself clearly has become a vastly more experienced and determined politician than he was when he was first elected back in 2016. He's gathered together an extremely impressive team of people. I mean, you can argue about some individuals, but he's brought in Elon Musk who's doing extraordinary things. at Doge of very extraordinary things. We're going to have even more extraordinary people. We now have Robert Kennedy, who's now, you know, it truly is, you know, the enemy at the gate as far as big farmer was concerned.

He's now through the gate. He's pursed through the door. He's inside the fortress. He's now going to be in charge. So that's going to be revolutionary. We're going to have massive changes in the intelligence community. We've got Tulsi Gabbard. We've got John Radcliffe, who's not to be underestimated.

in my opinion. And Pete Hegseth in charge of defense. And we've had a complete change of approach to Russia, which again has been revolutionary in its implications. And as somebody who lived through a US-backed coup, this is back in the 1960s in 1967, I have to say that the whole way in which the entire regime change, colour revolution, industry is being dismantled because it's been clear to me that this was an industry, that this was the thing that had basically got out of the government's control. It was running things by itself, carrying out coups in all kinds of places like Bangladesh, which really had no real strategic or geopolitical purpose anymore. The way that's all been taken apart in just a few weeks, I mean, it is astonishing.

So no better person to discuss all of these extraordinary things with than Robert Barnes. And Robert, I get to start by asking you about something that you touched on in a program. I'm afraid it's a technical question. But it's one that's coming up. I'm being bombarded with questions about I'm not in a position really to answer them. But there is this issue that Donald Trump is now going through the entire federal bureaucracy. people are being suspended, people are being dismissed. They're complaining angrily, some of them, that this goes against their contracts.

I have read a fascinating article in the New York Times that the Trump people are saying, if you want to bring legal cases, bring them on. We have this theory, the unitary theory of the constitution, of the place of the president within the executive branch. I remember you discussing this in a previous program that we did. It seems to me it is now taking poll significance because it explains an awful lot of what Trump is doing. It's therefore more than just a theory. It's a practice and it is one which apparently the Trump people believe, and a lot of jurists believe that the Supreme Court is going to uphold.

Now, can you explain what this is and why it is important? I appreciate this as a technical question, but it's one that I've been trying to get my head round, and I can think of no one better than you to start this with, because it seems to me it's the foundation of a lot of the things that are currently being done. Yeah, in the United States, there's a constitutional theory called the Unitary Executive. So under the Constitution, Article 1, Legislative Power, Article 2, Executive Power, Article 3, Judicial Power. The legislative and judicial power came with all kinds of limitations that are not present in Article 2. Article 2 vests all the executive power.

And for those unaware, at the time of the founding, that was considered kinglike powers in just the president of the United States, who's the only elected official involved at all at any level of the federal executive branch. Like some states here in America, the attorney general is elected, other parts of the executive branch are elected, not at the national level in the United States. Only Trump is elected. And the original conservative theory was behind consolidating power in the executive branch, but it extended, it got other sort of independent, populist-inclined legal minds to concur because it's the only elected head of the executive branch. That the, the only chance the American people have to impact our executive branch is through the election of the presidency.

They can have some impact in terms of the Senate, in terms of confirmation and things like that. But for the most part, the only way the impact executive branch policy and prerogative is through the election of the president. So if you want to respect the vote, you have, you want that president to have as much power as possible. You want the only person that's elected to be the one with the power, not people that are unelected. What has become the adversary of effective government, I would say domestically and globally, has been this administrative bureaucratic state that has developed in the post-World War II era. To take Peterdale Scott's reference in the late 1960s,

when you take this deeply entrenched bureaucratic, unelected, administrative state, and you give it the power of the Pentagon, the power of intelligence gathering, the power of State Department diplomasies, the power of economic sanctions, the power of law enforcement, the power of the national security state, you create a deep state. And that was a dual state, which was an old English doctrine originated by a publisher, editor at the economist, which was, you know, how could you have this state continue to function independent of the will of the people? Well, you have a dual state, an administrative bureaucracy that's emerged parallel to the,

the elected members of government. But when you give them national security power, it creates a deep state and that communicates the corruption that's involved in it. It's entrenched influence, which is involved in it, etc. And so it's a term that originated on the left, popularized on the right in the Trump era, thanks to Steve Bannon and others who come from sort of a more populist mindset or perspective. But it was basically co-opting the country to where it didn't matter who you elected to the president,

the same foreign policy continued and certain aspects of domestic policy continued unabated. No change. It didn't matter. I mean, you go back and look since World War II, other than a brief little period of time with John Kennedy and a part of Jimmy Carter's administration, you basically see no difference, no matter who's the policy. You would know who's president by our foreign policy. You wouldn't know who's president that there's anybody different by our domestic policy

as it related to that foreign policy. The other thing that I think has been sort of somewhat unique about the deep state imperial ambitions is that most empires are supposed to enrich the domestic population, not impoverish the domestic population. But the American empire, you can even say sort of the Anglo-American Empire because of its origins, and it's ties to the Brits in certain parts of Europe, Atlantisist Europe. So it's such a degree that they're called the Atlantisist in certain intellectual circles, these neocon neoliberal alignment, is that they don't serve their domestic populations. They serve their own sort of globalist agendas independent and separate of, in fact, usually they extract rather than contribute to the domestic populations. Like a lot of the USAID scandal, you can go back and read books like Lords of Poverty talking about how this is sort of operational in the NG. world. There's a reason why governments complain about NGOs. It's not, you know, the, not because that they hate humanitarian aid. That's because that humanitarian aid ain't

what they're up to. And the interesting, it was authored by Graham Hancock. It was now busy, you know, fighting the law civilization, which I always consider an effort to put down the Greeks. You know, the Greeks couldn't have found out all these great ideas. They had to come from somebody else. The, but, but that's just a joke for those not paying attention. I think Graham Hancock does great work. The great investigative journalism worked back in the day. The, but it is the net effect is that what Trump figured out in his first term was that the American government wasn't run by anybody that was elected.

The American government was run by an entirely unelected cadre of people. He tried to maneuver within that group, but they effectively derailed his most significant foreign policy objectives by Russia gate, then Ukraine gate that led to impeachment, than the COVID pandemic. You know, they did three things and how that COVID pandemic was handled, what was allowed to be talked about, what was not allowed to be talked about, so on and so forth.

That the, you know, I mean, having him defer to people like Fauci, which, you know, enrages him to this day now, is that they were able to effectively derail his first presidential term. And I think they thought that they could, you know, use lawfare to derail any chance at a second term.

That ultimately failed. and they underappreciated how ready he was to go at the heart of the deep stated multiple approaches. And he's come at them at so many different levels at the same time that their head is spinning and they were unprepared. I mean, the way in which he was able, as you guys have done in great detail, the completely circumvent the entire European establishment and the domestic neocon neoliberal establishments on the topic of, the Russia and that he was doing this broad scale that he was going to use the ukraine conflict as a way to normalize relations with russia entirely not just solve the ukraine problem but go back to kickstarting what he wanted to be the case which has now been made much more difficult to achieve

because of what happened in the last eight years particularly the biden four years getting anybody uh to to trust the u.s again is going to be it's going to be treacherous on its own terms because the Trump has his own view of the dollar, my own perspective on the dollar. But however you look at it, you know, the whole world saw that the U.S. government could weaponize the dollar itself, weaponize Swift itself, weaponize the financial system itself, weaponize the mechanism of trade itself in such a way that they have no incentive to trust the United States again. And so Trump's got to rebuild those bridges.

And he's managed to start the process of doing so while keeping all of the people who would love to sabotage that completely in the dark. I mean, they didn't realize what was going to happen when Hexeth came over and talked and said, you know, maybe ultimately we're out of NATO altogether. The, uh, when J.D. Vance came in and said the problem in the world isn't Russia or China. The problem of the world is the European elites, is the European leadership, is the European Godric, uh, which they're still shaking in their boots about and enraged about even John majors coming out of his wheelchair to write little pieces. Uh, you know, I thought he was dead like

Poppy Bush. But the, and so the, it's, while at the same time, he went after their money, which was the, where USAID is,

is the central base. And now he's after NED. I mean, he's going to checklists, checklist, checklist, checklist, checklist. And he's pointed out in the cabinet now, the entire deep state has to deal with both

Robert Kennedy coming at the side of dealing with a range of topics. And other things that Robert Kennedy's involved with, beyond health and human services, he's part of the cabinet that Trump is incorporating in the disclosure of confidential the classified files concerning the Kennedy assassination, the Robert Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination, other Russia gate files are probably coming down the pipeline as well. Epstein files, ditty files after that, all kinds of

interesting intel and information buried in those groups, given who those people were involved with and complicit for. And then Tulsi Gabbard, OD&I. So who's going to be coordinating all intelligence over all intelligence agencies who have been her principal adversary for the last decade. And so the and then at the same time keeping the spigots flowing because

the money's getting cut off and trying to prevent transparency by Elon Musk running around with Doge started off as a meme coin and became an actual government agency to unsettle. You couldn't have scripted this. This was like a 14 year old version of the simulation. And I mean, I mean the, so what's going to

happen is this billionaire dude that likes to send rockets to space and wants to colonize Mars is going to use a meme coin to defund the deep state apparatus. I mean, you wouldn't have believed it two years ago. And it's all going to be run by a reality TV star who's been elected in the President of United States after being indicted impeached, investigated, and attempted bankrupted. It's just wild. And I understand certain perspectives on the left that are skeptical of Trump and so forth. But I think the proof was going to be in the pudding. I mean, you're already seeing it. What's happening with Russia is probably his first great foreign policy success, maybe of his entire tenure to a certain degree,

going back to his first term, will be if he can pull this off. If he can completely end the war in Ukraine, get out without any risk of continuous conflict, such as NATO being in Ukraine, for example, and by trying to build, rebuild bridges with Russia, which I think will be as hard as anything else. It's being understated. All the West, you know, the pro-war people are all chanting at the, you know, bit that, oh, Higgsith and Trump are giving things away. Trump had wanted to make clear those things are never going to be on the table anyway. He wants to normalize relations, not use increasing threats to try to get something that's not going to get there anyway.

I mean, he understands Putin and Russia well enough to understand that that's a loser strategy. It's always been a loser strategy. The loser strategy for Biden. It was a loser strategy for Obama. It was a loser strategy for Bush. It's been a loser strategy for. for a while. But it's clear what Trump's objectives are. I know that some people that come more from the left perspective have difficulty trusting someone that comes from the right so that they

pre-screen this. But you know, you follow people, you know, like Aaron Monte, people like Michael Tracy, people like Glenn Greenwald. These are people from the left that have followed foreign policy for a long time. And the, and over time, you've seen them come around that that Trump, Trump is a more nuanced figure than what, you know, a pre-edological filter would impose on him. It goes all the way back to his uncle, Fred Trump, who was the guy who they entrusted to look at Tesla's records after Tesla died, you know, brilliant scientists who constantly warned Trump about the risk of when he was just a kid growing up of the nuclear conflict, the nuclear war. This is, I mean, Trump will talk about it from now that, that it truly preoccupies his mind. And that's why they're like a lot of people, my friends on the left were shocked when Trump, came out and said, I'm willing to cut the defense budget by half if China and Russia will go,

what will go with me. Trump sees spending on the, much, not all spending. He sees some spending on the defense industry is domestic manufacturing, domestic industry. That's a fact that the left and others haven't always come to terms with that, you know, if you want to take apart the defense industry and say, we need a lot less defense spending, remember some portion of that employs high-end labor and high-end work. Trump is more cognizant of that, I think, than some people on left are. But there's a lot of it, he sees as, net negative efficiency. It looked at productivity, the investment rate of return you get on defense industry spending. It's not as good as a lot of other domestic industry. He would prefer to invest it.

So that part didn't surprise me. Trump's going to be very job concerned. He's always going to communicate strength because it comes from that position. He also thinks that's the way you achieve peace, as you come across a little bit crazy, a little bit gangist conish, a little bit like that, and that will achieve objectives you can't otherwise achieve. But so far, it's been a blitzkrie. to use the old German phraseology, through the deep state in ways they clearly didn't anticipate because they weren't anticipating defending on all these fronts. So they filed, you know, 50 lawsuits begging courts to get involved.

And going back to the origin of your question, Alex, I think the Supreme Court of the United States is going to come in and adopt the unitary executive theory, going to prohibit courts in the future from issuing injunctions beyond the scope of the parties before them, called nationwide injunctions in these cases. that would substantially reduce the ability of one judge to just completely derail the federal government,

as is happening currently. And I think they're going to empower the elected head of the executive branch to do what he wants in terms of personnel and funds, that he has certain executive discretion, and it's not the duty or privilege or prerogative of any court to impair that. So I think that's where we're heading. We'll probably get that Supreme Court decision within six months because so many judges are issuing so many crazy decisions

that crazy decisions has seen from large parts of the public, that the Supreme Court will have no choice but to act sooner rather than later. I agree. Can I just say, and I'm going to say this, and there's some people not going to be like what I'm going to say, but I worked in bureaucracies, government bureaucracy. I have seen how government bureaucracies in Europe block decisions that they don't like, that, you know, ministers and officials, elected officials, find it impossible to get things done, which they've been elected to do, because the civil servants,

the officials around who work with them and who through whom they are obliged to work, don't like them. And here we have in the United States a document, the constitution of the United States, a relatively short document, which says, look, there's one individual, he's the president of the United States, he's elected, he has the power because he's elected to cut through all of that. Now, that you will find, I will say this straight away, you will find that in no other country. And of course, when the Constitution was written, you didn't have direct elections in the way that you do today.

It was much more with the Electoral College. But it is inherently a democratic mechanism. It means that the people have the right to elect, not just the president of that choice, but an effective president of their choice and get the entire government working in the way that the president wants. Now, that's one thing I have to say.

Now, I will get to say something else. Donald Trump, one of the things about him, is that he is an extremely American person. This is something again, which in Europe people just don't understand. He is 100% American. So he is obviously operating. within the culture that the Constitution and the traditions of the United States have created.

And he's using that in the kind of dynamic way that we are seeing him do. He is also an extremely clever politician. Now, this has been obvious to me right from the beginning, right from the first moment he came down that lift in Trump Tower and announced that he wanted to stand for president back in 2015. but the skill and cunning with which he has acted over the last few weeks, the incredible energy, the ability to keep going at such speed, the incredibly careful preparation that this has done,

the discipline he has imposed on his team, because all of this has clearly been planned completely in advance. Well, it is astonishing. Nothing like this. I haven't seen anything like this in any other country. Normally, for a prime minister, say, in Britain, to gain authority, it takes years. Prime minister has to be successful. If there's someone like Margaret Thatcher, they have to work incredibly hard over many, many years in order to gain authority.

The same true for Putin in Russia, by the way. He wasn't able to do in a few weeks after he became president the kind of things. Trump has been able to do because he has to gradually shape the bureaucracy to his purpose. But in America, it's different. In America, the Constitution, I think, does empower the president to do what he's doing. And the culture of the United States has produced a personality like Donald Trump, an all-American personality that has that instinctive understanding of it and that energy, which is also, by the way, can I say an American thing, which makes it possible for it to be done. So I am quite astonished. And talking about left and right, if Donald Trump had come from

the left and was doing half the things that he's done, the left would be overjoyed. The old left, the left that I remember. He was appointing to head the intelligence community, people like Tulsi Gabbard. He was appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. to run the health at the health department and to take on Big Pharma. If he was opening up all the files,

I mean, we've had left-wing presidents, supposedly. We've had Lyndon Johnson, you supposedly left-wing. We've had Jimmy Carter. We've had Bill Clinton. We've had Barack Obama. We've had Joe Biden. Did they open the Kennedy files?

Were they ever talking of opening the Kennedy files. And here is Donald Trump. He's going to do it. He's going to do that. He's going to open up the Martin Luther King files and all of the other files. And he's, you know, pushing forward to do all of those things. And again, we've had people who ran on anti-war platforms. They never achieved anything. Or always war continued. The military industrial complex was always there. Eisenhower talked about it. As I said, we've had left-wing presidents since then. They've never challenged it in any meaningful way.

And Donald Trump has come along, and he's talking about halving defense spending and doing things that people on the left have talked about. More than any other presidency, more than any other individual, you can see how outdated, how exhausted, how discredited what calls itself the left, not just in the United States, but globally, has now become.

So those are a few things I wanted to say. Now, let's just go to the mechanics of all of this, how this is all being done. First of all, Robert, I mean, are you, am I right in thinking that this is all planned and this was all prepared? And have you any idea? And I'm talking, I'm focusing on the domestic,

side. Let's get on to the foreign policy side in a little time. Who exactly has played central role in all of this? I mean, clearly, Elon Musk is an important figure at Doge, but I don't think he can be the only one. So who are the people? What is the team behind Trump, which is pushing through all of this? And how have they been able to act so secretly? How were they able to prepare things in a country like the United States where leaks happen all the time where the intelligence agencies keep everybody, especially Trump and his people, presumably here, particularly researched and investigated and surveyed and all of those things. How are they able to do this? I mean, it is quite amazing because this is clearly not made up on the fly.

It's really sort of it represents a generational shift. So you have sort of what you could call the more libertarian populist wings of the conservative Republican and Trump movements that have become more geopolitically savvy and more ruthless and tactically. And so they grew up in a different generation. They grew up seeing as they saw it, their adversaries be ruthless in what tactics and techniques they utilized. and they felt that that needed to be reciprocated. And so a group of people that often have working class roots, different ethnic roots, disproportionately, you know, something other than WASP.

That, you know, like I would have to explain, but like America's original contemporary deep state structure, the post-World War II era, CIA, NSA, different parts of the Pentagon, et cetera, that they were founded by a unique cultural group white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who mostly went to the Ivy League who usually had Yankee ancestry. And if those don't understand Yankee ancestry, it means people in America who, when they asked what their ancestry is, they say English. By contrast, the core of Trump's, this new constituency of influence within the Trump camp,

if you went to there, the counties they grew up in and asked them what your ancestry was, they would say, Amerin, to give you an idea. One way you could track Trump's highest level of support is counties that listed American as their top ancestors. And they would get agitated with the census taker when they were like, oh, I understand that, but where before then? And usually that didn't end well for the census takers. So that sort of is part of a big cultural gap, big cultural shift. And it's part of the reason why the sort of deep state apparatus in its current ideological inclinations didn't see it coming. So a lot of what you're seeing was discussed back in late 2020 before the election.

There were people that I knew at the higher ranks at the Trump administration who had worked their way up over four years, who had an entire detailed plan on how to deep six, the deep state, by every means available to them. And they weren't naive or they were sufficiently naive that they believed they could do so. the you know I always said when I was a kid after my my dad passed away there were two books I carried around as books I really looked at people I looked to in books I really respected as a 12 year old one of them was Donald Trump's art of the deal which is all about managing mindset I still encourage people read it to try to understand Trump he'll talk about you always expect the best always plan for the worst and it's a fascinating that you have to believe you're going to achieve

in order to achieve. And yet you want to be prepared just in case it goes the way it normally does. And so these people were talking about some of this back then. They were figuring out how do we take apart the deep state apparatus, the administrative state apparatus that's co-opted the country. And they were looking, and what I'd been arguing for a long time, but I just didn't have allies on the right for, which was defund them, send them to jobs that they will never want to do. and really creating a unified executive to make it constitutionally clear

the president has policy control over what these people do. And they're implementing all three. And they're implementing them at pay. And they were talking about it five years ago. And to give an idea of who this group was within the Trump administration, it was the same group of us that were pushing for Snowden's pardon. And it got very, very, very close to Snowden getting pardon and Assange getting pardon. the Assange was the priority at the time because he was in custody of Britain.

And so they're that group of people. And so it's clear they have been quietly brainstorming in C, but they come from a different cultural background, socioeconomic background, not just a different ideological background. They study what the sort of administrative state does and the left, etc. But they're not part of those worlds. And I think that's part of why the left was totally taken aback. by the administrative state writ large, shocked by what has always been the weakling,

which is they control the spigots of the cash. And the, I mean, what's extraordinary is Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute and others have been researching is it appears that since Truman, since the true origins of the modern contemporary American deep state in terms of the institutional power it has, post-World War II, is that the president of the United States and his direct appointee, have been excluded from the Treasury's actual processing of checks and payments since Truman. And it's like, that's insane. So no president since Roosevelt has had the perceived authority to double check where the money's going.

And it turns out like 30% of it has no categorization at all. Can you mention being the CFO of a small business and saying, hey, we gave $3,000 to George, but I'm not going to say why or how or what for it's like what the heck you couldn't do this and I think what you've emphasized Alex in that understanding Trump's not only geopolitical realism but also in terms of business mindset business approach is a very useful approach yeah the now I knew Hegsseth I knew hegseth was sort of on board because I talked to him about the Ukraine conflict way back when he was at Fox before he was you know now Secretary of Defense and The other thing that's a factor here is what J.D. Vance, Pete Hanksith, to some degree, Trump, represent.

Is a new working class rooted. But these are pro patriotic, pro-military, guys who joined the military, guys who believed in the military, all that, guys who believed in the 9-11 story initially. And what they saw was their friends and their pals die for what turned out to be a lie. and they have never forgotten or frankly forgiven it. It's a defining driving factor for J.D. Vance. It's a driving, defining factor for Pete Hicks. And it confuses people on the left because, although, okay, he's a big soldier guy,

he's a big military guy, so they get a certain image of what that means ideologically, not realizing that, you know, those people like Eisenhower who are deeply anti-war, that, you know, there is a tradition of generals who understand the horrors of war, who don't try to necessarily drastically and dramatically expand the military conflict. Back when Brackwin Brits and Churchill wanted to go march into the Soviet Union,

it was, and back when a lot of his own generals said, hey, we got nuclear weapons before anybody else, let's use it to conquer China, conquer Russia, conquer the whole world. It was Eisenhower that was no. A lot of the deep state rose under him and all the rest, which he would then complain when he did his farewell address, but it was too much of a wust to say it beforehand. But that's that ideological intellectual tradition that's been reanimated by all the neocon lies

over the last 20, 30 years. Whereas Vietnam activated the left, the lies about the Iraq War in 9-11 animated the populist right and returned the populist right to its roots, which was the entire predicate of the American experiment in substantial part was to not get involved in other nations' war. wars. I mean, that, that you can find it, you know, all the way through the constitutional debates,

all the way through the American Revolution, all the way through the early stages of American history, all the way up to, you know, people like John Adams talking about we don't go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. And since World War II, that is all the deep state has been committed to do, that the horrors of Hitler were enough to rationalize in their minds. That's why the very first place you see everybody on the neo-con, neoliberal, particularly the British world, the first thing they go to when Trump's talking peace with Russia is, oh, this is Neville Chamberlain, 1938. Now, you could be real creative and you could work at CBS and say, oh, free speech is what brought Hitler in the Nazis. I was unaware of that. I was unaware of free speech is what led to the Holocaust.

No idea. Thanks for CBS News, corporate broadcasting service, at least its first part of its name is accurate. But that sort of mindset and mentality, it comes from the populist right. It was the populist right that was skeptical of getting involved in World War II. It was populist right that was skeptical of getting involved in World War I. That was the populist right that goes all the way back to the founding of the country that said, we don't go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. We're not going to make the mistake of Europe and get involved in European wars.

And that's what you're seeing brought back in the rhetoric of people like Hague Seth and Vance, that what they're bringing back is that old language. Europe is your problem, Europe. It's not going to stay America's problem. Cold War is over. World War II is over. Macron can just say merci because he ain't speaking German. And then move on the way.

That's it. America's done what it's going to do. It's not going to go any further. America has been used as the tool as the playpen of these globalist elites that want to leverage American resources for their self-enrichment, for their self-empowerment at the expense of the people and populations they're supposed to be serving. It's not just the bad impacts of empire on the world. This has been an empire that has been extractive and destructive to the working classes of America,

not only in literal deaths on the battlefield and all the disabilities and PTSD and everything else that comes from all these dumb wars, but on top of that, economically crushed in terms of the industrial base, the manufacturing base of the country. which then has national security implications because you have critical components of your supply chain that might be dependent on the foreign nation. So I think that that's the you're absolutely right. Alex, this was exceptionally well planned, exceptionally well executed. Trump world has not been well known for not having a single leak come out. The only leaks that came out were leaks that misled everybody. I mean, MI5, MI6, everybody should be camped.

I guarantee, I mean, everybody over there, I'm sure was saying a whole different story. the Daily Starmer there and then what ultimately sort of translated. So yeah, absolutely, but it's been a long time coming and I would say one little added component like people wondering why is the deep

like my friends on the left are shocked at Trump exposing deep state money, deep state projects, deep state methods in terms of USAID especially. The deep state made a tack two things happen. The bureaucracy became overwhelmingly liberal.

overwhelmingly to the left. And consequently, that limited the ability, that antagonized people on the right. They lost allies on the right as the bureaucracy became like D.C. at 90% plus Democratic town and was willing to weaponize their power against their ideological adversaries. The other aspect of this that is under Obama, the deep state decided to align their pockets of cash with democratic patronage machines.

So that's why you're seeing a bunch of projects that aren't even really deep state projects more. They're Democratic Party projects in order to get buy off Democratic allegiance. But what that did is antagonize Republicans. That's why people like Senator Ernst and Senator Rubio were upset over the years about USA being secretive and giving money to their adversaries. People who should be on their side but weren't. So part of it was the deep state has so badly mismanaged itself that it wasn't in a position to adequately receive. respond or defend to these Trump attacks. But you're absolutely right. It's mostly credit to Trump coming up with the plan to Blitz Creek through. Otherwise, they would have derailed him right out of the gate.

Absolutely. I'd like to talk about corruption, actually, because one of the greatest revelations for me, I mean, I've always known that there's been corruption. I mean, you know, you only had to look at Biden and people around him to see that there's been corruption. But it's not just the scale of it, but the sheer pervasiveness of it has astonished me. I mean, it really has been unbelievable. I mean, it reminds me again of the Greece that I used to remember when everything was corrupt and everybody was corrupt and everybody was on the take.

And it was the organizing principle of politics and even of society as well. That was the Greece that I used to know and I suspect there's a lot of it still there still now. But the bureaucracy had become, profoundly corrupt. The whole USAID money was sloshing around. It seems to have been more than anything else,

a gigantic slush fund to operate and carry out regime change in all sorts of places. And a slush fund within the United States as well, which is extraordinary. And one gets the sense it was just one of many. And you see all of these individuals now, who have been exposed, as deeply corrupt, or at least as taking money in all kinds of ways, and benefiting from this,

you know, Samantha Power, Bernie Saunders, and that's been a bit of a shock to me, I have to say, all of these people, suddenly it turns out that they become multi-millionaires, Samantha Powers, $30 million. That is quite incredible, actually. So, when this happens, it points to a profound. rot within the system. It tells you that the Democratic Party that Roosevelt knew and which Kennedy knew really doesn't exist anymore. We're just talking about a parasitical predatory, incredibly dangerous, semi-criminal, you know,

operation that's gained enormous control of the American political system. And it's just basically siphoning off funds from it. in order to benefit itself. But we also see that, you know, the mechanisms of the deep state of the bureaucracy had been harnessed to this end. They were all of them protecting

and facilitating each other. It's all becomes sort of gigantic business. I mean, regime changing Bangladesh is a business out of which people made money. I mean, that's absolutely clear to me now. And, well, such a system. system is, such a rotten system, is ripe, falling. I have to say this, it's amazing that it has been done

in this constitutional and legal and democratic way. In other countries, in other societies, a country that has become as rotten as this, a system that has become as rotten as this, would have been ripe for revolution, But in America, it's been otherwise, again, because of the nature of the political system and American society, which is allowed for a pushback. But tell us something about this, because, you know, I mean, there's always been corruption in America. You know, you go to the Tweed ring in the past and all of that, you know, the rob of barons and the things that Theodore Roosevelt did.

But it's never been on anything quite like this, not on this scale. The Clinton administration clearly was deeply corrupt. But the Biden administration seems to have taken that to a completely different level. Also, it seems to me. But tell us something about this. Yeah, I mean, basically they quit limiting themselves. They grew accustomed to power. I've described it as, you know, if you study late stage colonial empires and, you know,

how they start, you know, they fail, they start increasingly being disconnected from the local population in terms of just effective governance. they can't even predict that there's going to be rebellions and things of this nature, that they become sort of just a parasitic, like Rome at the end, the sort of extractive parasitic industry that is no longer productive and that is negative on even its own domestic population that's supposed to serve. A little bit different in colonial context, but similar in that, you know,

they couldn't even protect their own self-interest because of the degree to which the corruption or the incestuous relationship of the bureaucrats, to a corrupted ideology ultimately prevented them from even being effective as colonial administrators, whatever you think of the morality of it. And the same thing happened here. The deep state had grown increasingly

disconnected. It was what's, I wouldn't have guessed if you would have told me three months ago, Trump is going to get the Democratic Party and its political apparatus and the sort of loosely deep state administrative apparatus to go out and scream

that the bureaucratic can't have their records disclosed, that bureaucrats can't have their pay cut, that bureaucrats and illegals are the people that Democratic Party is going to be talking about every day. And it's like, in what world, what environment do you think that's politically popular? It's like the bureaucrats are,

I'm running to normies that reach out to me, that are like, what the heck? I mean, you know, I like Democratic Party for supporting poor people and working people and discriminating against people. not helping bureaucrats in D.C. afford a million dollar home. And the number of, you know, what's being searched now in D.C., criminal defense lawyer, money laundering, foreign, offshore banks.

They're trying to sell their house. I mean, this is what's happening in D.C. is it's exploding. And what I've tried to explain to people is that we not only have a sort of corrupt deep state that is extracting American resources for foolish empire objectives of a European mindset. And to give an idea, going back to the original American, in a deep state in terms of who staffed those positions, they were overwhelmingly anglophiles. You know, the sort of lost belief,

if you go all the way back to them dragging us into World War I and the relationship with the Rhodes Roundtable and all that crowd, I mean, there were some people in Britain that thought they were going to reinstate the old colonial relationship with the U.S., people in U.S. who thought they could make Britain their colony. But it was this very much empire-driven mindset that didn't care about the domestic population of people.

And most Americans don't come from that ideological background or ancestry in terms of ethnicity. But they were clearly shocked and surprised because it's how the system really operates. If you operate, like if you will listen to you guys or listen to people like Glenn Greenwald and others, a lot of this wasn't a surprise. It's, you know, the USA, the National Endowment for Democracy aren't actually about aid or democracy. you know, the, as Ron Paul once said, it's about poor people in rich countries, given money to rich people in poor countries when it's not about overthrowing their government. And it's, it's, you also see what the Soros influence that, you know, all the open, you know, society kind of structures that Soros used. I mean, someone was telling me the other day, you know, the American intervention creating the Ukrainian problem dates to 2014.

Like actually, it candidates to World War II, where, you know, Operation Gladio, we left people behind. We went into bed with Nazis in order to undermine the supposed communist. You know, we were supporting the Banderites before anybody else was in the 1950s, long of the western Germany. Of course, the Russians paid him back a little more directly. But that whole history, but then also it's George Soros. 1990, Ukraine was his first like big pet project to a degree. And so the, you know, there's a reason why he's so opposed in Romania now, or the Romanian, you know, a likely president to be. pointing those the issues with soros out but that model that open society model which also corrupted

everybody around by parasitically and involving them in the the money and the economy of it like bill gates did with public health right through the world health organization create all these NGOs if you research too is doing the fact checking for public health organizations you find out they're funded by bill gates's foundation you know and the this kind of incestuous corruption where you had this public-private partnership activities. This happens all the way down to the local government of how they manipulate zoning to help real estate and things like that. I'm to watch a John sales movie to figure that out. But the court is the institutionalized corruption. If you look at George Soros his organization, Bill Gates's organization, and the third I would recommend is the Clinton Foundation,

you'll get the roadmap for what USA did. It was just they were so brazen about it. It was like, it's one thing to steal the public's money, to create a another stupid war that's going to hurt us and make us less secure rather than more secure around the world. It's quite another to say, oh, my friend George needs some money. Hey, George, what do you need some money for? Or what's going to be our excuse? Say, I'm helping trainees in Peru. You know, I mean, it's stuff like 95% of that money never even went to the ultimate destination. And then the U.S. people still think USAID helped poor people around the world.

It's like USAID was designed to screw poor people around the world. So it was always that way. And that's why a lot of foreign leaders knew it. But the Trump's willingness just to expose it. I mean, like you'll go back to the only other time something like this is, well, there's twice. Once, if you go back to the post-World War one era where Congress held war racketeering committees, those are some of my favorite committees. And if you want proof of what I'm talking about in terms of this populist anti-war Republican tradition, look at Senator Nye, who ran that committee from North Dakota. I mean, he blamed all wars on banksters and corrupt military profiteers.

The, thus, you know, war profiteering and racketeering and all the rest. The second time they really faced challenge was the church committee, house assassinations committee, part of what happened after Nixon's resignation and Watergate. But those are the only two times they've faced meaningful public exposure. Trump has managed to expose them without having to go through all the committee hearings and in record time by just going to where their money is and showing how, it is that not only is it disruptive and destructive around the world, not been congressionally authorized in a clear way, not been transparent, but kept hidden in secret

by accounting tricks and bureaucratic exclusion of elected presidents. But on top of that, they were just so brazen about what they were willing to fund and support. And that's why the court of public opinion here is not behind, oh, we must rally to USAID, we must rally to the bureaucracy, we must rally to the deep state, we must rally to the deep state we must rally for more war there's no appetite for it like i'm detecting a little bit in britain a disconnect about where things are domestically in the u.s that it's almost like they've been deceived by the deep state's ability to corrupt our administrations over decades into thinking that that's publicly popular it's really never been popular but it's never been more unpopular

than it is right now in america america wants no more of these dumb wars they want no more of foreign aid They want no more of being entangled in a foreign world. Most of them support Trump's tariff strategy. Most of them support Trump's withdrawal from the Ukraine conflict. Most of them support no more foreign aid as much as possible. Most of them support the U.S. aid cut off. Most of them support NED cut off. So they're tired of their money being wasted.

They're tired of caring more about foreigners than Americans as they perceive it. They're tired of the empire politics. The EU is not particularly popular. And I think, as you guys put it recently, you know, you have the sort of ghost of empires in Europe coasting on American political power because they've been able to co-op America's sort of deep state infrastructure to continue to propagandize their Napoleonic ambitions when in reality they are functionally dead. I mean, there's the European Union and what it can and can't do economically. But otherwise, I mean, does anybody?

anybody's scared of the French. Anybody's scamming like the bits. They're like, well, send troops to you. Who cares? Sharmer can come over here and he can bag and get on his knees and everything. It ain't changing. We're out. Ukraine war is going to end.

The conflict's going to be over. Deitante with Russia is going to be reached. What I don't know is how much it lasts because I'm sure the Russian political leadership knows it cannot trust the West ever again. The question is, you look at what you ask what Trump is really doing. I think you described it best and were the first person to really articulate this in an intellectual framework

is that there's these fears of influence and what Trump is making clear is he doesn't consider Europe or great power. U.S., China, Russia. That's kind of it. He didn't mention the European Union when he talking about defense cuts. He doesn't care about Europe.

And why should he? Most Americans escaped Europe. Why should we embrace Europe's laws? going forward. Absolutely. Can I just say, I want to say something about Britain very quickly, which is firstly the fact that in the early 20th century, the British political class, the leadership of Britain, the imperial government leadership of Britain, wanted to harness American power, even then, in order to keep the British Empire and the whole British project going. That is not controversial in academic circles anymore.

It has been researched exhaustively. We know exactly who was involved. We know exactly how it was done. We know how they made friendships with people across the pond, as we say in Britain, in other words, across the Atlantic in the United States, how people like J.P. Morgan was not, by the way, completely persuaded. But others absolutely were. Henry James, the writer, good example of somebody who was.

the British made a concerted effort at that time because they knew that they could not sustain their system by themselves indefinitely. The British made a concerted effort to win over the Americans. But of course, what the people that they focused on was elite Americans. the people that they knew and liked and whom they met in Boston and New York, you know, the sort of patrician Ivy League class of the United States that they could relate to. If they went beyond that, you know, they really didn't understand working class America. And to the extent that the British elite knew about working class America, they didn't like it.

You can see that again in the literature of the time, and again, what I've just said is uncontroversial. Now, that brings me directly to what has happened in Europe over the last week, because two locomotives have crashed and smashed the European political class and left them really. Far more even than Trump's conversation with Putin, it's the shock of the speeches by Pete Hegses and J.D. Vance. And it's really quite incredible because especially the J.D. Vance speech for me is really remarkable because the Europeans were horrified about it. And they were horrified with the line that he was taking that, you know, Europe is falling away.

from democratic values. It's not the free part of the free world anymore. It's not integrated. It doesn't share the same values as the United States does. But as we've discussed Alex and I, when it comes to the details of the things that J.D. Vance said, I have never seen, I have not seen a single article commentary speech

anywhere in Britain, anywhere in Britain, anywhere in Europe that says that J.D. Van Scott, any of the details wrong. He was right about Romania. He clearly was. He's absolutely right, by the way, about the people who get arrested outside abortion

clinics here and who get arrested for saying the wrong things in their prayers, in their own homes. He's absolutely right about I know all about that. He was right about everything else about the information control, the firewalls that keep parties.

political parties, you know, even reform UK in Britain, are supposed to keep them away from, you know, playing a role in government, even though they're supportive. And as I said, there was an extraordinary article, which for me said it all out beautifully, which was by a commentator, very typical British commentator. One I can't stand, by the way, but he's very emblematic of the British mindset,

in which he was saying, here's J.D. Vance criticizing democracy in Europe. Democracy, canceling elections, restricting free speech, arresting people when they pray, disregarding the way people vote, doing all of these things, engaging in, you know, disinformation campaigns to censorship, all of that. That's democracy. That is democracy. And J.D. Vance

and what he represents, he's the authoritarian. Are you kidding me? But that was how the Europeans have reacted. Nothing to my mind shows how completely unprepared they were for this.

How they've been completely blindsided. And what an absolutely upside down world these people in Europe living. Just say. Yeah, it's completely. And I think for some people out there in the audience who are trying to sort of predict where, you know, U.S. policy is going to go under Trump, and most likely I think Vance will continue that tradition if he, of course, wins himself in 2028, is that they blame Europe and the European mindset for a good bit of this. In other words, what they see is the worst of what America became, particularly the last five years, but in their view, the last 25 years, is, adopting a European mindset, a European mindset that could lead to censorship, a European mindset that could lead to calling Ukraine a democracy when it was canceling elections,

when it was closing churches, when it was harassing dissidents, so on and so forth. And so that's why they want to divorce from Europe. And now I think what you're going to see, like Europe is trying to, is starting to escalate in their rhetoric. I don't think, I'd be curious what you guys think, but domestic, Trump could care less what Europe thinks. I don't think they have much political juice in the United States. There's not big areas of support for them. There's an interest in pushing back against them. I don't see them having power levers. I mean, Trump's tariffs could be much more impactful on the EU than vice versa, at least as I look at it economically. So it's not clear to me they can do anything to effectively derail the Ukrainian peace ever.

But what do you think? Well, absolutely. I entirely agree. I don't think they've had this meeting in Paris. And it all immediately fell apart because they all ended up quarreling with each other. I mean, Stama and Macroch tried to bounce everybody into sending a European army into Ukraine. it immediately became clear that the European army, the British and the French armies, to all intents and purposes, do not exist.

There is an article today in the Daily Telegraph by a British military commentator, Dr. Jack Wattling of the Royal United Services Institute. He says, you know, the thing is we have one armoured division in Britain, except it's got no armour. All the infantry armoured personnel carriers. they've all been shipped off the Ukraine. There aren't any. They're 12 guns.

That's all they have. That's what a British Army division amounts to. We've got a number of tanks, but we can't operate them because there's no maintenance. There's no logistics to do it. The French apparently are in a little better shape, but not much. We have a Navy. There's a whole YouTube program about this by a British historian. We have a Royal Navy.

which is more admirals than ships. How can you take us seriously as a military political force? And when, you know, you propose sending troops to Ukraine, we've got no troops to send to Ukraine. We got no military to send to Ukraine. And, of course, the Europeans are all saying, well, you know, we're going to increase defense spending. We've got no industrial base to produce the weapons.

We would have to buy them from the United States, because the United States still has an industrial base. But we haven't got one to any, to more intense and purposes, any longer in Europe that could do this. And we've all got budgetary crisis. We are absolutely up to our ears in debt. We have problems with, you know, fiscal rules. We've pushed up taxes.

We cannot do the things that, we would need to do in order to get the Americans to take us seriously. And coming back to what you were saying about the fact that a lot of people in the United States within the general MAGA movement, Trump movement, all of that, blame Europe. I can entirely understand why. Because we have been pretending for 30, 40, 50 years that we are allies of the, United States. We are not allies of the United States. We are not providing the United States with anything of any military value. We are exactly, as you said, we've been coasting off American power

so that Annalina Behrbock can go to Beijing and lecture Xi Jinping or do the same with Narendra Modi or whomever she wants, pretend that she carries weight and authority because she's part of the collective West, of which the real superpower, the only real superpower, the United States is also a part. So this is all being, it's been called time, and I can't imagine that the Europeans ultimately are going to be able to put together anything

that can by itself block any movement, towards Ukraine peace or a Russian-American rapprochement. The only thing that can stop that is if there's opposition in the United States from all the usual suspects, the neocons, the deep state, if these people can get their act together and find some way to block it off, that might be able to do it. But if the Americans are set on this, and I think they are, by the way, then the Europeans are not going to prevent it.

That is absolutely my view. That makes sense. Comment on that and then I had a question as a follow-up. The other thing that people should remember is that Trump holds both Britain and Zelensky accountable for what happened in his first time. So Trump has not forgotten that MI5 and MI6 and related British agents, Christopher Steele, etc., XMI6, were neck deep. in Russia Gate.

Indeed, the Brits tried to calm that down, but I was either the head of MI5 or MI6, like resign the day Trump was inaugurated back in 2017. If you look this up, it's one of those, the little around that time, to try to ameliorate, but Trump hasn't forgotten it at all. And the Daily Starmer was very active at being anti-Trump, anti-Trump, Annie Musk, was, you know, basically sending Labor Party people to campaign in it here in the United States. And then something's saying people turn around and complain about J.D. Vance's comments. And he was like,

What world do you? I mean, the degree of delusion these people live in is just strike. But it's the problem when you really create a bubble around yourself. You no longer can be tactically savvy or skilled because you don't even understand the other side. You don't connect to them. You don't relate to them. You're not part of their world. So you can't predict what they're going to do.

You can't preview what they're going to do. You can't anticipate what they're going to do. And so that's like, I mean, I'll give Trump credit. I mean, when Zelensky stuck his head up there for a second, Zelensky didn't get his message. I mean, if Zelensky wants to retire in Miami and in Malibu like he's planning on doing and being in Hollywood and all the rest, he needs to realize that deep state is dead in the Trump administration from Trump's perspective.

So it's almost like he thinks, oh, I can go around and smack around Trump, but there'll be no consequence. Trump will escalate the consequence. That's what happened. He'll leave you in Ukraine, Zeletsky. And then your wife's not going to be able to afford those Paris shopping trips. I mean, the key is always been the money. Cut off the money.

Ukraine doesn't exist. I mean, it's just economically, we're paying for the janitors for crying out loud. I mean, and then this was something that I said from the get-go with the people that are anti-Ukraine. I said, focus on the foreign aid aspect. It's like, I get you can end the nuclear war escalation rooms. The other stuff Americans are going to, you know, no citizens really care that much about citizens of a foreign nation. That's just not tribal loyalty in its very nature, evolutionary or otherwise. But the, but you, but Americans never liked their money going to something they didn't understand. that they didn't care about that didn't relate to them that didn't improve their lives. And that was always a weak link.

But what it made was Ukraine completely economically dependent to where Europe's not willing to step in and give them all the same money that we are. And so Trump knew he had complete leverage over Zelensky. All they do is cut the literally the monetary strengths. But I mean, like he was in the White House and they asked him, hey, you know, Zelensky is saying this, this, you know, shouldn't you have Ukraine there in Saudi Arabia? And he's like, Zelensky's nobody. He goes, you don't even want to know about his popularity in the country. He's not someone he respects because Zelensky, it was the Zelensky phone call where he thought Zelensky was an ally back in his first term, where he just wanted Zelensky to expose

the deep state involvement through Joe Biden's corruption of Ukraine, connected to Ukraine, all of which later was proven true. And then it was Zelensky who went silent when Trump gets impeached based on a bogus interpretation of the phone. Trump has not forgotten that. People go back and look. Trump is not a forget and forgive kind of guy. He's like an honorary East Tennesseean.

So he holds the line. The other aspect is, so he hasn't forgot what my five to my six did in Russia Gate. He hasn't forgot what Zelensky did at Ukraine Gate. So he could care less about both sides in that regard. He would like to see them have an embarrassing outcome. That would make him feel good, frankly, about it. And that's why he's going to try to come up with some monetary cover to justify the deal domestically.

So whether it's, hey, we got the raw earth minerals, even if there are no raw earth minerals, it doesn't matter. It's going to be, you know, something sold domestically to see, I got everybody a good deal. Trump doesn't, it's not a hard sell. There's not a huge demand here in America for more war, more war, more war, more money to Ukraine, more money to Ukraine, more money. There just isn't. And then the other interesting thing, I was curious what you guys' thoughts on this were. It seems like Trump is

sewing a dividing line between Central Europe and Western Europe. In other words, it's increasingly almost like Britain, it's all the former empires of some sort, to a degree. Like Britain, France, West Germany, and

some of the Nordic countries are the ones that are a problem, whereas increasingly Spain, Italy, Greece, and then places, I mean, Poland that has its long history of rivalry with Russia, but is acting like they're not going to meaningfully interfered anything. Hungary, of course, is on board. Slovakia, of course, is on board. And now soon Romania may be on board. And East Germany, and its vote support for AFD, suggests there's more

populism surging there as well. So the two things. One, could the EU effectively, could this be the beginning of the end of the EU to a degree? How might all of this back, you know, let the, I mean, whether it's out of NATO or NATO's irrelevant, however it's done. I mean, America's out of NATO, NATO doesn't matter. You know, A and NATO really is America rather than Atlantic. But the, how much do you think this divide could happen? It couldn't even lead. I mean, like Orban said recently, just wait around and the EU will be dead. That, you know, we don't have to withdraw. It was an interesting statement.

But it seems like you're seeing deeper, deeper divides that reflect an old historical divide between Central Europe and Western Europe. or the old Europe, you know, in Northern Europe on some of these issues. Do you see that as a possibility in terms of how this backwashes on the EU, how this backwashes on the efforts of Europe to create like this European army, like Macron occasionally talks, that kind of stuff? How much will that be gone as a net effect of American with effective withdrawal, if not actual withdrawal, which, by the way, you'll see Trump leaked that as a message to Europe that if they keep yipping about the Ukraine conflict and bashing Trump,

it's like, well, I can always accelerate plans and just pull out of NATO all together. So think, you know, think before you go and yip. Now, they don't show any capacity to do so yet. But also, do you think what the Romanian elections, I mean, I thought the other advantage of J.D. Vance's speech is it makes it very hard for the Romanian courts to throw out in the next election. And it looks like the same gentleman's going to win, who's promising to kick sorrows and NGOs and other groups out of Romania.

What do you have thoughts on the EU future, Central and Western Europe, dividing, and the elections in Romania and Germany, how well might AFB do? I think the left populist party might outtake its former independent left. I think it's called link, but I always get the, my brother speaks German. I do not. But what do you think about those elections also in the context of all this? Well, I'm going to just anticipate by saying this. And it's a very simple point. Without the United States, without the power that the United States has exerted in Europe over the last 70 plus years, there would never have been an EU.

If the United States leaves, the entire EU project becomes unsustainable. It becomes unviable. The United States in Europe, because of its power, because of its influence, because of the fact that it has all of, of these various states together in the alliance, which it leads, is the glue. It keeps the whole project going. The fact that the United States has seen as the supporter, and which it has been up to now,

of the whole process of European integration is what has given it its impetus. The EU has been able to grow, to develop, to centralise, to become what it is, off the back of American power. Take that power away and the whole impetus, the whole engine starts to run down

and the whole thing breaks down. So if the Americans leave, if the Americans leave Europe, the EU is doomed. It may take a while before it happens, but we will start to see the contradictions of the system start to escalate and they will become ultimately unsustainable.

Bear in mind, it's becoming increasingly unpopular within Europe anyway. And yes, absolutely. You are seeing a division between Western Europe, the old, big, powerful countries of Western Europe, the imperial powers of Britain and France, the imperial power that to a great extent was Germany. But you're starting to see a division between them and the Central European states especially, who have always struggled against empires, who've always wanted to assert their independence against empires. And they say, we don't want to be run by Brussels.

We want to run our own affairs. That's what we fought for. That is what our history is all about. Obviously, we want to be Europeans. We are part of this continent. We are part of the culture of Europe. We, in fact, are very committed to the, the culture of Europe, whereas of course the people in Brussels are not because they want to use,

they want, they want, they have a more power focused approach and they're preferred to use traditions and conceptions which are anti-national in order to impose on Europe an artificial centralising project. So I think it will come apart. And can I just go back to Pete Heggsaz now? I mean, we talked about J.D. Vance. Pete Heggs' speech was pretty astonishing in itself. But the thing that really horrified the entire European political class, the comment that he made that shot the most was when he said, you can't expect American troops to be in Europe forever. And of course that's exactly what they've expected. They've assumed that the United States would always be here,

that it would always be helping them do their various things. It would always help them get out of trouble. Can I just say when Greece found itself in the middle of the Eurozone crisis, when it looked as if we were going to be booted out of the euro, who was it who stepped in, who told the Germans back off a little, who told at Cyprus, make sure you remain in the Europe. It was the Americans. It was Barack Obama himself, in fact.

So they've always been there as the silent partner of the whole enterprise. And if they tire of it and they're going away, and they say, as they're now saying, that they have other higher priorities than that dooms the whole project. And the Europeans deep down know it. And when I was looking at the elections, I see it as, I mean, the, you know, I know Alex has referred to it as the Zelensky curse, you know, appear in a photo with Zelensky and you're doomed politically, but, you know, we're seeing sort of a populist,

uh, EU skeptical, uh, perspective, uh, surge now in Romania, uh, that's right on the border of this entire conflict. Uh, you know, the, you know, Orban is still solidly in his position, the Slovakian president wants all the U.S. aid, uh, disclosures sent to him, uh, in terms of what was happening in Slovakia with USAID money. It's going to have the same pattern everywhere. And I'm glad these other nations are using this because, I mean, this is, you're not going to get church committee type disclosures like this very often. I mean, it's been very rare in American history.

So take advantage of it while it's there to gather this intel, gather this information to put it out there. I mean, Trump is also seeing it from a geopolitical economic perspective, protecting knowing the dollar, but he's also talking about gold. He's also talking about maybe going back on a gold standard. He's talking about a Bitcoin reserve. And he's reaching out and he's talking a lot about AI. Apparently talking to Putin about AI.

It appeared part of Vance's speech almost was like Europe. If you want to be part of our technological innovations, which are happening right now in AI, then Europe needs to be more like America and rather than America be more like Europe. in terms of these issues of speech, in terms of these issues of free and fair elections, and so forth. Now, I think because of Vance's speech, I don't think the remain, do you think Romania's courts will have the same goal

to try to set aside this next election? I'm assuming not. And how well can AFD do? Like, there's a part of me that when I was betting on the French elections, I end up always betting on Macron against Le Pen, just because I couldn't see the French left ever crossing over to the French right in a way I could see maybe vice. versus occurring with Melanchol. But to what degree do you think it can, there's a part of me that, you know, being from visiting Germany over the years,

that has a hard time, they're so terrified of any affiliation or association with their past, with their World War II past especially, that almost all you had to do would say anything about that connected to that, you could discredit a populist right movement. But it looks like it's not working now. It looks like AFD is going to cert.

I think they may, overachieve. And then I think the left may be replaced by the more populous version of the left in terms of where that party is going to go. What are your thoughts on how those elections might proceed and reflect upon all this? This is a very good question. Now, I know Germany reasonably well, but obviously it's not my country. And I don't get access to private opinion polls or things like that. So German elections, as you absolutely rightly say, have been up to now very, very controlled, very polite, courteous affairs, as German politics tends to be. Everybody basically agrees with everybody else. There aren't huge divisions between the political parties. Social Democrats

are somewhat to the left on some things. The CDU, pretty centrist party overall, but, you know, it leans a bit to the right on others. And the Germans, Germans up to now have kept it that way, have liked it that way. As I said, it's not the past. They don't want the radicalism and the polarisation of the past because they remember what that all led to and they're terrified. They're still afraid of going back to that. Many of them still are. A lot of people in Germany have accepted a lot of the neoliberal philosophies. I mean, you do find, I mean, Germany is a place where you find more people, perhaps, who accept those ideas than you do in most other places, or so I've tended to find.

And besides, this is a conformist society. I mean, one needs to be careful about indulging those kind of stereotypes, but Germans do tend to want to maintain an orderly, disciplined political system, one that they're used to uncomfortable with. So all of this tends to argue against the IFDA making a breakthrough. The trouble with that, though, is that firstly, the past is now very far in the past. That thing is wearing thin. And people have seen the IFTA.

It's on television to the extent that they allow it to be on television. They watch Alice Vidal and they can see that she's personable, and clever and articulate and tough. and she's not at all like the mustachio gentleman of the past. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to sustain that line. And at the same time, he is saying things and the IFDA is saying things, which more and more Germans agree with. And the other great thing that's changed in Germany is that until about five years ago,

Germany thought of itself was very successful. It assumed that it was economically prosperous, that its economy was better run than everywhere else, that everything was efficient in Germany. By the way, not true. It was increasingly not true. And we did many programs about this on the Duran. But it was still a view that many, many Germans held. They don't hold to it anymore.

So they're becoming very concerned. They're very worried about the situation. They're under an awful lot of stress. They see the big German companies under pressure. They're worried that Volkswagen might either shut down its factories or sell them to the Chinese. They're worried about the fact that the chemical industry is closing down. They're worried about the state of the steel industry. There's a long article in the Financial Times about all of this today, about problems in Germany.

They're worried about immigration, which has been basically hurled at them without anybody really agreeing to it or having a proper discussion about it. And here you have Alice Vidal, and she comes along and she says, look, it doesn't have to be this way. It can be different. Why don't we take a different approach? And they like what they hear from her. And yes, there are those residual concerns,

but they're gradually, ever so gradually melting away. And the same is true on the left, because of course the IFDA is a right-wing party. But coming back to the left, you've got this new movement led by Zara Vargechnecht, which, interestingly, it is setting itself out to be the old left. It's trying to be more like the left that was. It says, what is the left? What is the left in Germany?

Remember, our modern conceptions of left and right basically developed in Germany in the 19th century. I mean, this is where working class movements first began to organize politically, where the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany was established. So they say, she says, look, it should be a working class based socialist, socially conservative political movement. That is what the left ought to be. And that is what we are. Now, the other party that existed, Delinca, which also represented or tried to represent itself as the pure left, the old left. Now, that basically is the old East German Communist Party that repackaged itself. Then a couple of years ago, it wanted to update itself and to modernize itself and it wanted to break through into West Germany.

So adopted all the woke things. that you have from the Democrats. It began to shift very, very, very much in that direction. So Zara Vagiknex says you're not left anymore. You put all that behind you. We are the real thing. And interestingly, she's gaining traction. Now, she hasn't, her party has only been around

for a relatively short time. But apparently it will win enough votes. to pass the barrier to get into the Bundestag. And it does seem to have overtaken Delinka, which, of course, because of its history, has deep links in Germany, in Eastern Germany. So it's a moving picture. And it's possible that when the election happens on Sunday,

I'm not predicting this because I don't know, But it's possible that we will find that the IFDAIR has voted. The actual vote for the IFDAIR is higher than the opinion polls are suggested. Because it appears to be talking in the way that more and more Germans want to hear. And the old parties are losing the confidence of the German voters. And they're becoming critical of them. Now, if that happens, if the IFDA achieves that kind of breakthrough, then it is a revolution in Europe. Because Project Ukraine, which is already collapsing, without Germany, I mean, nobody remotely believes it could be continued by the Europeans by themselves.

But without Germany, the whole EU project, as it presently exists, can't continue either. So the stakes are very high, and the political class in Germany will do all it can to keep the situation back under control. And, you know, one mustn't discount what they can do. And they're pretty ruthless about him. I mean, one of the points that J.D. Bans was making was that it's in Germany, perhaps more than in any other place, you have all the laws about disinformation and misinformation. you can be tried, you can be arrested for saying the wrong things, putting up the wrong tweet and things of that kind.

Now, can I just say something about Britain and the role Britain played in the first Trump term, the absolutely central role that Britain played in Russiagate? This is absolutely true. The British persuaded themselves incredibly, and it's one of the most baffling things, when Trump came in that somehow he had put it all behind him, that he would, in fact, listen to the British. The British have made one mistake with Donald Trump after the other. They sent Lord Mandelson to be the ambassador to Washington.

I mean, the worst person you can send, a Blair Wright, former EU commissioner, which is just incredible to think that he could be the person you would want to send to talk to Donald Trump. And of course, Stama still thinks that he can establish some kind of connection to Donald Trump, despite the fact that he did everything he possibly could to stop Donald Trump getting elected.

And his policies in Britain are completely different from the policies that Donald Trump is following in the United States. It is very weird and very bizarre, and it shows the extent to which the British political class cannot think beyond the alliance, the historic alliance, with the United States, and at the same time can't change direction. And are telling themselves,

all that's happening in Washington, somehow it isn't true. It isn't real. Donald Trump isn't what people are saying he is. He's actually really like us after all. He likes us. He had Churchill's bust in his office and things of that guy. I mean, it is completely delusional.

And it's actually, I think, ultimately rather funny. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like for, you know, Trump's background, his various families were originally German. that for those that don't know, you know, German Americans were often opposed to World War I or World War II because they're, you know, Germans were part of the, the world worthy target in both wars. So, and that's a British skeptical group. And if you grew up in New York politics, you know, the, in New York City politics, you read Kevin Phillips and others who's really good at describing American political history. If you want to know the sort of broader American political history, read like emerging Republican majority, a text he wrote in 1966 for the Nixon presidential campaign, produced a book in 1969. But it goes all the way back to the very beginning of how these different, if you understand that, for example, we got the rural Norwegians, but we got the urban Swedes, then you know why Minnesota has these divergent paths. This populist group within rural Minnesota has Norwegian ancestry to this day. Whereas.

The Swedish population that settled in Minnesota is very institutional, well, kind of like the Swedes back in Stockholm today. Maybe they have their own Stockholm syndrome in all of this. Now, some people have asked to a couple of the questions in terms of the question about the preemptive pardons. There's nothing, I mean, I'm a big believer in the pardon power, so I don't want it restricted or restrained. The short answer is that it is completely legal and constitutional, and there's no meaningful way to set those aside.

Now they are limited to federal crimes. They don't cover state crimes or crimes and other jurisdiction. I think like one thing Putin at one point put out, Russia put out, is that, you know, they would consider indicting Anthony Fauci. Maybe part of the negotiations could be to exorite Fauci throwing Soros and Gates. I think we got a deal. So we'll see how that goes. So people might be.

So yeah, that's, that's, and they're not like precedents, but they, the, The way in which the best way to hold them to account is to cut off the money and get rid of their jobs. Like what's amazing with the Justice Department, all he had to do was say, in fact, these London's across the board. So there's a whole because of these ludicrous civil service laws that we passed, in my opinion, ludicrous. Because what you had was these old working class political machines. And while those political machines were corrupted a certain way, they were actually more representative of their electorate than our current government is. And the old spoiled system in America, you know, whoever won got to give all the federal government. the jobs so and so forth change with civil service reform under the idea that that would make

that if we professionalize the bureaucracy that would make it better it's made it worse it's made it captured by a group by a class interest a professional managerial class interest that is often ideologically opposed economically adversarial culturally different than the populace they're supposed to be elected they're supposed to be representing or laws they're supposed to be enforcing And so it's, you know, part of that, that, that function, that animal. The, oh, the Amos Miller, that's ongoing. You know, one, two areas of weak links with Trump in the appointments are the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins. She has no background in, she came from a small town around farmers, but otherwise has no background to farming at all.

It comes from a oil, Rick Perry backed, oil industry back, think tank in Texas. that then formed in DC. It called itself America First. It was not the same group of Stephen Miller. It was basically a way to try to staff the Trump administration with people that would be less hostile to DC interests. And I'm so I'm not convinced she'll be a good secretary of agriculture. That's still very much an open question.

The feds have not yet dismissed the case against Damis Miller. And in Pennsylvania, the attorney general Republican gets in promising to reexamine these cases. Instead, he's having his deputies send invasive discovery demands to the Miller. So there was even an article written that people could look up that acknowledged that Trump's win was guaranteed, regardless of what anything else happened, because of the massive Amish turnout in Pennsylvania. And the publication that published it is a publication that's hostile to me, hostile to Amos Miller, hostile to the case. but they said the publicity about the Amos Miller case led to a massive surge of interest by the Amish that guaranteed Trump was going to win no matter what because he was guaranteed to win Pennsylvania due to the big Amish turnout. So it would be a betrayal of the Amish and small farmers for Brooke Rawlins to not deliver, but unknown yet whether she will as to that question. This particular Grand Cup does have a Canadian flag, but they can't become our 51st state until they learn how to play hockey.

you can't get embarrassed by the U.S. in hockey and get beat up. I mean, I remember Canadians used to be tough, at least the hockey players. I don't think anybody else is scared of Canada. I mean, you see Fidel Mian Castro's son there trying to run things. Still, all his popularity sinks into oblivion. But I think a lot of what Trump is talking about in Canada, Panama, other areas, I'll give him credit. There must be something going on behind the scenes in Venezuela because he got Venezuela release those people that were basically coup plotters and send them back and got them to accept

the Venezuelan gangs that had been coming up, which, you know, it looked to Trump like Venezuela had deliberately sent those gangs as kind of payback to the Biden administration and said, hey, we won't keep you in prison here as long as you go to the U.S. and pay back Biden for the sanctions with doing what you guys are up to. But apparently you've agreed to accept everybody coming back for deportations. There's no reason they did that for. other than they're expecting some release on sanctions. I think you won't see Trump went along in his first administration with Elliot Abrams and those lunatics who wanted to overthrow various Central American governments.

Yeah, he was half-ass involved in the Guido thing. Not like it wasn't, it was there, but not he was, he was never fully on board. But now I don't think you're going to see him on board at all. And of course, USA turned out to be funding everybody in the opposition in Venezuela. I mean, how organic is the opposition if you're having to spend it, you're able to pay or anything. But I think we'll probably see less of that. Politics in terms of Cuba that some people asked about probably not going to change. I mean, Marco Rubio has been an extraordinary conversion experience watching that.

Some of the guy that was an old school neocon, all of a sudden sounding like Trump everywhere he goes. And now he's going to do the Russian deal. And his name's going to be attached to that deal, something he never would have done six years ago. what Rubio's transformation shows is Rubio's recognizing the domestic population political change, that the political shift is back to old school populist, conservative, war skeptical, anti-intervention, don't be involved in entangled in foreign affairs world, that we expected to come about post-Cold War era, because the Cold War sort of temporarily put that on hold. And the conversion of Rubio was probably as good an example of that as any,

but the one place that's not likely to change much, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective is U.S. relations with Cuba, likely to stay the same for the next four years. Some people had asked, but I think you'll see Elthur in Central and South America. Trump's focus will be on deporting people, getting agreement to deport people, and a different trade relationship. Because he sees that, you know, what essentially global U.S.-based companies did is they resource their labor to countries that have less environmental restriction, less governmental restraint, and basically they can pay slave wages to in certain cases or a lot lower than U.S. wages. He wants to rebuild. His biggest problem with Canada is Canada stole America's auto industry in part, as he sees it.

So he's going to refocus on rebuilding domestic manufacturing. He's going to try to increase the popularity of trade as a economic tool to reindustrialize the country and as a national security capability. Try to get domestic buy-in for those things by reducing domestic taxation. he wants major more foreign direct investment uh and he wants to unleash crypto and that thus for example he's talking about no tax on on uh gains on crypto things like that now of course if he's if he wants to fulfill all those promises on crypto he's partially done it with what he's done at the SEC partially done it with who he's brought into the administration partially done it with the commutation and pardon of ross obert but he should pardon roger vier i mean you look at you know roger

colloquially known as Bitcoin Jesus is right now on the clock could be extradited at any moment, physically removed at any moment, put stuck on a U.S. military plane from Majorca in Spain to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, which has a long history of being controlled by foreign gangs, by the way, but not a safe place to be. He's someone who was previously subject to persecution, politically motivated persecution. objected to Ruby Ridge. He objected to Waco when he was involved in politics in his early 20s. The feds targeted them and put him in prison for almost a year for doing what, but not buying and selling the right licensed fireworks. Literally fireworks got him in federal prison for you.

And so became a big advocate for the financial freedom capacity of Bitcoin. And he's been involved in all kinds of debates in the Bitcoin world as people who feel differently, one way or another about whether they agree or disagree with him. But what's undoubtable is he's dedicated large part. parts of his life and put his own personal well-being at risk to back the financial freedom aspects of the Bitcoin and to promote the democratization of capital that Bitcoin could provide against centralized banks and centralized planners and centralized intelligence agencies. And you read in his book hijacking Bitcoin all the ways he describes and the way the intelligence communities around the world and the banking elites around the world are trying to suppress the financial

freedom capacity of Bitcoin. You see Trump talking about creating even a Bitcoin reserve. So you're seeing him exploring ideas of political power connected to the U.S. dollar by talking about, you know, could gold help, could Bitcoin help? Are there other ways to do it? So you see Trump's kind of exploring this in his mind. But the fact that the U.S. government is right now trying to put Roger Veer in prison for 109 years based on the, they claim the IRS that he didn't pay tax after he was no longer a citizen based on money that was not sourced in the United States. States. I mean, they're taking a novel legal theory that has never been applied before.

And they're saying, well, if you disagree with us, citizen on whether something is taxable, we'll just put you in prison. Now, Roger Rear was never afforded the opportunity to go through the civil process, never even told, he even used the Freedom of Information Act to request how much he owed, and the IRS still refused to tell him. So here he has been criminally prosecuted without any benefit of the civil process, without even being told how much money he owes, without even being allowed to actually pay the money because he's not told how much he owes for those purposes. And looking at locking him up for 109 years when this is basically a payback effort of the deep state to suppress and harass the independence of independent minds of the Bitcoin space.

So Trump should pardon or just dismiss his case, which he can still do because it's in the pre jury trial stage of the case here in the United States. If he was serious about, you know, promoting and allying with the crypto community, in the vein he can do the similar things and i still favor even though julian asange is now physically free why not pardon julian asan pardon ed snowden and do so as a weight of sending a message to the corruption of the deep state they they hate julius don't and edward snowed more than anybody that's why they were obsessed with harassing tulsi gabbert about snowden uh the but the reality is he was close to pardoning snowden in his first administration i know that from and and and asan in his first

administrator. He should go ahead and go forward with it now. The you get a sense like the other sense that you knew that Trump was for real was how he treated Mike Pompeo. Pompeo really thought he was going to be influential in the second administration. And not only is he not influential. He's been completely excluded from everything. I think he's even a security clearance. It might have been taken away. I mean, it's that Trump has not forgotten any of this. Trump has roadmaped out who his adversaries were, kept a map of it and figure out how to get through them, how to get peace. And so I think a lot of of like panama can out trump wants i think your sphere of influence is the best way to understand trump trump wants control over operational security both for national security and economic

purposes of important shipping routes uh and other undersea routes that connect to certain aspects of both of greenland uh canada and panama now greenland may want to join the u s who knows the uh so that may take its own course but i think that's what's behind a lot of these dynamics and the fact that I thought is very promising for those that want as little risk of nuclear conflict as humanly possible, you know, reaching out to Russia and China in that respect show that a lot of the Trump's China skepticism is rooted in economics. It's wanting to reindustrialize the American industrial base. He's often said this, he doesn't begrudge China doing what they did. He just thinks that there's a bad deal for America to continue to be in that kind of economic relationship.

For that in part, he wants control over the sphere of influence that concerns economic security and operational security and national security. Hexeth kind of hinted at this with his discussion about the Russian Navy. It's they want more security in their sphere than Trump sees it as currently being the case. But he doesn't want martial military conflict in China. And in the Middle East, I heard Aaron Matte's description. Where Trump is coming from is an assumption that both the two. state solution and a Palestinian return to Israel is not achievable. And so he looks at what's a third possibility. It's to enrich the lives of Palestinians somewhere else. And I get people on the

Palestinian side deeply opposed to that, but understand that, like Trump's not going to just throw an idea out there off the top of his head. That's Trump looking past what he considers the ultimate solution. And he thinks the ultimate solution is the Arab Muslim world embraces the Palestinian population in a way other than maintaining them as a martyristic cause to rally national and pan-arivism, Pan-Azlamic influence. So whatever you think about that, if you want to persuade Trump or the Trump world of a different position on the Palestinian issue, it's why a two-state solution can work in ways that many people in the Trump world don't think will work, or is any more attainable or achievable.

But I think Trump's goal will be to keep a lid on the conflict to try to not. He doesn't want a direct martial conflict with Iran. He doesn't want that to re-escalate again in the Middle East, that he's just looking past, okay, if this doesn't work and this doesn't work, what about this? And maybe that won't work. Maybe the Palestinian people have no interest in it. Maybe the Arab Muslim world is no interest in it, whatever, that may be the case. But he's just looking at alternatives to the current situation as he sees it. But there's no desire for, you know, some people are thinking, oh, Trump wants, you know, imperial America, you know, set up the capital's

all around the world. And, you know, there's going to be a Trump bug, Trump, Gazalago. that that's not always where Trump is going. So, you know, to those questions, I think that that's the issue. The, oh, I'm sure Kennedy don't want to join the U.S. Trump just wants leverage. But here's the reality for Canada, for those that are up there in Canada, your economy depends far more on exports to the United States than we depend on exports to you. So Trump knows he's got all the leverage.

And Trudeau is pretending otherwise because he thinks it's his rallying cry so that his liberal party doesn't end up on zero seats in the election this summer. Cash Patel, Robert, a lot of questions about Cash Patel. What's going on with Cash Patel? So Cash is an old school guy. I mean, what's ironic is cash is sort of cash is an idealist, fundamentally. So, I mean, he'd been a U.S. attorney, you know, he'd been associated with federal law enforcement and the military security apparatus. He goes to work for Devin Nunes.

Devin Nunes is an anti-Russia guy. I mean, you know, he believed the anti-you. That's how he became head of the House Intelligence Committee. But he sees Russiagate and he's like, this is ridiculous. And I think because of his naivete and idealism, they just sort of marched into it thinking it must have been a few bad faith actors at co-optives. It's like, no, this is the whole thing. You get your anti-Russian ideas from these same corrupt propagandistic influences, which they discovered the hard way. So Cash Patel is the guy that's the front line of uncovering an unmasked, Russia Gate.

Amanda Millius, a daughter of the great Hollywood director, John Millius, did a great documentary called Plot Against the President. that introduced Cash Patel to an entire different political space. And from it, he became sort of a celebrity in an aspect of the Trump world. And that's why Trump entrusted him with the FBI after Matt Gates decided he wasn't going to go through a brutal confirmation process that might derail Trump's agenda early on. And so Cash is definitely a reformer, believes that they need to depoliticize the FBI and they need to save the FBI from itself. And that's part of what we're going to see. We're going to see how much these institutions survive by backing off, by trying to reach a compromise position with the Trump administration and its allies,

or how much they go to the wall. Because if they go to the wall, they may lose and may never recover again. They may be done and they may be finito. Like the smart move would have been not to complain about USA, right? Just find another way to get the money into the deep state apparatus. don't make clear that you're aligned with those deep state apparatus, that you defend those apparatus, that you are receiving money yourself from those apparitions. I mean, there are federal judges making rulings on cases in which their wives said on NGOs

receiving money from the USA, and here they are making rulings on whether Trump has the power at some limit USA. And it's like, wow, I mean, this is corruption that's brazen and bold, even for these people. So I think that that will be the question. There's a lot of questions about gold going on. I do hope they go in to figure out whether the goal is really at Fort Knox. The, where all the goal is supposed to be.

Here's another fact. Here's probably what's lurking behind the scenes. Brett Johnson of the milkshake theory of modern, about modern the way money works in the U.S. dollar. The had a big discussion of this on X and then on his YouTube channel. But like Trump could put an extra trillion dollars potentially in the budget. By getting the Fed to recognize a higher value,

for the gold that they took from the American people back in the under Roosevelt. And what it is is the right now it's the Fed recognizes a gold certificate. I think it's 42 bucks or something per per ounce or whatever it is. But basically it is way below the current market value of gold, which is, you know, approaching 3,000. So he could overnight, if he got the Fed to recognize that increased value, all of a sudden the U.S. Treasury has almost another trillion dollars to spend. that's how big that is that may be what's lurking on the gold front but what trump is playing around

with is figuring out to what degree does the u.s dollar secure american interest globally and then how do you secure the american dollar if that is the case in the current environment in a bricks environment in a bitcoin environment and uh in an environment uh concerning whether the dollar is really vat value or it's gold standard that's where you're i think you're just seeing him openly explore in his mind, different potential solutions to what he perceives as a problem. I have a slightly different perspective on all those things, but I think that that's where Trump's coming from. There's also a lot of questions real quick, Robert and Alexander, you may want to chime in on these about the negotiations between Trump and Russia. For example, Nicholas is saying,

yeah, even if Russia trusts Trump and his team, why would they, something can go wrong in the future from Rumble. We have a question from Colorado Watch. says the same thing. How can Trump, how can Russia possibly bargain with an unreliable negotiating partner like the U.S.? So there's a lot of questions about the possible negotiation between Trump and Russia and what the future might hold? Yeah, if Russia was governed by somebody other than Putin, I think it would be very difficult to get a deal done because I think the hostility would be entrenched, the skepticism and cynicism of American intentions or the ability to perform, you know, off the charts because of the insane

actions that the Western world took, including, but not limited to the U.S. I mean, you know, famous, you know, Chelsea, a famous soccer team there in the UK, you know, stripped of its Roman, of its Russian owner during all of this insanity. So it's just been off the charts, you know, banning Russian songs, banning Russian, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. The, but it's Putin. Like, probably the only foreign leader and, you know, there's some others that are that are up there.

But I think the guy that Trump can most easily work with, deal with, and negotiate with is Putin because they're both geopolitical realists. They're both sort of have a bottom line approach to whatever deal they're doing in terms of where both of them are really ultimately committed to security for their own people. And whatever best attains and achieves that. And I think Putin recognizes there's an opportunity with Trump to put things on a better platform. then he'll get with anybody else. And so I think that's where, I think Trump sees as an opportunity, not a risk. The risk they can defend against and protect against and they already have.

I mean, in truth, they've already won on that issue. Like the great perceived risk for Russia was could they withstand economic exclusion from the West? And the answer is yes. In fact, they're probably stronger now. Their military is stronger now. Their armament structures are stronger now. Their industrial base is strong. stronger now. Their agricultural base is stronger now. There's really no reason for Putin to be

worried about what the West can do to him before. So it's how can he use this with Trump to put his people in a better position? And Trump understands that about Putin. That's where like Trump could say whatever he was paying with anti-Russian rhetoric, knowing that Putin would care less about it. And Putin, the way he has played that has been brilliant all the way through, you know, constantly, you know, saying, well, you know, we wouldn't have had this war in Ukraine if Trump had been if they hadn't have stolen the election for president trump i mean he knows how to hit every button he knows how to correspond he's in my opinion whatever people like or dislike about putin he is the most intelligent leader in in the rest of the world outside the united states um and so i think

he's going to do what's in he sees in his best interest and his best interest is getting as much as he can get done while he's got someone that's not inimically opposed to him in america the other factors, as you guys pointed out, certain things can be put in motion right now that completely decon-that put the EU in a position where they're just on an irreplaceable path to irrelevance. And if he, I mean, he got along with coal, you know, very well with Germany. So, I mean, in the past, he's managed to maneuver through Europe relatively well. It's these, this EU apparatchit class and its British Empire allies that became parochially obsessed with Project Ukraine by piggybacking off of, you know, George Soros' project at the time of

memorial. And the, and there were neocon neoliberal aspects of the United States eager to embrace that as well. But it's not the Trump world. Putin probably sees an opportunity where he can just wedge right through. I mean, Putin's willing to negotiate with anybody, including people that been very hostile in the past, very adversarial in the past. You know, he's like Trump in that regard.

He doesn't let the past hold him back at achieving what he thinks he can get done right now for Russia. And I think it's that common self-interest of what's best for America, what's best for Russia, what's best for the world that is going to bring about the end of Project Ukraine and a meaningful detente with Russia, at least with the time being. Now, I think Russia will never go fully embrace or intertwine itself in the Western economies the way it did before. That's where it'll be more careful. but on a lot of on armament deals, on Ukraine, on other monetary arrangements in terms of ending the sanctions and the rest. I mean, I think it came out today. Rubio is already saying, we're going to restore the embassies. We're going to restore all normalcy in that respect.

You know, so this was, I think Putin is smart and savvy enough to see an opportunity when he sees it. And I think it's in the best interest of everybody around the world that Russia and the U.S. not be at odds. I completely agree. Can I just say a few things about this? First of all, why would Putin not deal with Donald Trump? I mean, Donald Trump says Ukraine cannot join NATO. He wants to end the war. He wants to negotiate. Why would Putin refuse to negotiate when Putin has always said that he's open to negotiations? It would require Putin to reverse the position he has consistently held ever since the Spanish. military operation began. Now, there is a basic core reason. I've discussed this many times why Putin, the Russians, needs to speak to the Americans, want to speak to the Americans, specifically about Ukraine, which is, yes, they can win in Ukraine. I think everybody can now see that the Russian army, if it just keeps on marching westwards, will defeat Ukraine. And could,

if it wanted, occupy the whole of Ukraine. But if you just do that, without coming to an agreement, you're going to simply get yourself a whole new set of problems. Putin has repeatedly said this. This isn't trying to speculate about his intentions. He's repeatedly said that for Russia, the most important thing is the security of its western borders. In order to achieve long-term security of Russia's western borders,

you want to end tension, or at least if you can't end tension, manage tension with the West, and that means ultimately the United States. For Russia's own security, it's much better to do a deal with the Americans. than have an unending confrontation, which will divert resources from the civilian economy. It will threaten the militarization of the economy. It will create permanent tensions, which the Russians just don't want.

So, of course, he's going to speak with Trump. And he will try and come to a long-term agreement with Trump. And, of course, there's another thing in play as well. This has been very interesting, because the Americans, are now talking about lifting sanctions. And it's very interesting who was sent to Riyadh by the Russians to talk to the Americans because the Russians, they knew that,

I don't know how you pronounce his name, by the way, Stephen Whitgoft or White Goft. I'm not quite sure, but anyway, they saw that he was there. They saw that the Americans are talking about lifting sanctions. So they sent Lavrov, obviously. He's the foreign minister. He has to speak to Rubio.

They sent Oshakov, who is. is Putin's top foreign policy. He's expert, Putin's expert on the US. But he sent somebody else. He sent Kiril Dimitriyev, who is the head of Russia's investment fund. He's a businessman. He is there to talk about sanctions. And the Russians are already saying to the Americans,

look, if you lift the sanctions, we have, in some recent, We're a country not so different from yours. Like you, we are a huge continental country. We are very resource rich, just as you are. We produce and export oil and gas, which you do. We have interests in the Arctic. You have interests in the Arctic. Why, instead of working against each other all the time, on economic and other questions, why can't we try to? to some extent at least to work together. If you want to invest in the Arctic, you're welcome. In our Arctic, our part of the Arctic, you're welcome. We actually did a deal with Exxon once Rex Tillerson it was and negotiated it. They were going to develop one of the great oil fields in the Arctic. If you want to revive all of that, you're welcome to do it.

We are happy to do that. We will make the Arctic an ocean of peace. not an ocean of confrontation. That way we develop the Arctic, we get more resources for ourselves, we get peace in the Arctic, the northern sea route can work efficiently, we can get trade moving, we can do all sorts of things. And there's been many, there's been much history of this. The Russians have repeatedly said this to the Americans. It's not widely known, for example, but back in the 70s, the Russians wanted to build

Tricstar, Locky Tricstars, in Russia. There was a whole factory that was going to be built in, I think it was Kazan. I can't remember where in it, actually, but anyway,

wherever, no, it's on the Volga. But anyway, they wanted to build a whole factory to build Lockheed Tri-Stars, American wide-bodied jets. And this, again, is a possibility, it's an option that has always been there.

It's just been below the horizon. It's never quite worked. We had Jackson Vanek that killed off the Lockett Tri-Star deal. He was, of course, the senator for Washington State, and that was where Boeing was, so he didn't really want Lockheed getting involved in the Russian side. I'm not saying he didn't have other reasons. But, you know, the Russians and the Americans can work each other on a lot of economic things.

It doesn't mean that the Russians are going to end their relationship with China. Of course they're not. But they can work with the Americans on economics. They can build a long-term, stable relationship. The Russians often say that the fundamental reason why they've never been able to forge a long-term relationship with the United States at a political level is because there has never been an economic relationship. and there can be one and it can be mutually beneficial. So there we are. Exactly.

So I think it'll be, it's going to be, it's going to be fun and eventful. It's the most reformist cabinet in my view in American history and people. I mean, like I know everybody who's working with Gabbard at the OD and I, and these are long-term institutional reformer personalities. These are not corrupt bureaucratic actors that betrayed Trump's first term. So the Trump is legit. The march forward has just begun. We haven't even got into Trump taking on the Federal Reserve, which is probably coming down the pipeline because the Fed wants to show that it's not going to rate lower interest rates in order to boost the economy and that it can dictate to Trump, whatever Trump wants.

So expect Trump to authorize an audit of the Fed. I'm loosely affiliated with that in a lawsuit brought, in a case, FOIA case brought by George Gammon. rebel capitalist pro it's to audit the federal reserve they refuse to provide that information some of that's going to be utilized for the Elon Musk and that's why you see Trump talking and Elon Musk talking about maybe we'll appoint Ron Paul to the Federal Reserve along the the Federal Reserve's most of a syphorous high profile public critic so you know the every institution of corrupt influence is going to be subject to scrutiny by by Trump as it relates to the deep state and administrative state in large part because so many of them tried to conspire to bankrupt and imprison him.

And it turns out when you, you know, come for the king and miss, that doesn't tend to work out for those that missed. Absolutely. Fantastic show. You guys want to wrap it up? Two hours plus. The Oracle of London and the Guru of Vegas. Such a treat.

How would you compare the fall of the EU to that of the USSR? So Alexander will wrap up the questions in another show. all the questions that are remaining. I think we got a lot of the important questions knocked out with Robert, at least the questions, or very specific to Robert. We answered those. So let's wrap up this live stream. We will get to all the questions, me and Alexander, that are remaining.

We will answer those questions in a separate video. Robert, thank you very much for joining us on the Duran. Where can people follow your work? Yes, so everything, law, politics, including a hush-hush on Ukraine, as Ukraine began, that you can go back. and look and see how predictive it turned out to be. The at Vibabarnslaw.locals.com. And if you're just interested in some political betting opportunities or soccer betting or anything

else, including on the upcoming elections, been betting on elections now for many years, that's at sportspicks.locals.com. You can find those. We've got a bunch of picks currently up on the German elections, on the Romanian elections. That the Duran is a helpful resource. for trying in forecasting and the rest of that you know the durand dot locals.com the favorite channel and what you give a shout out to us of people who may be watching at the moment favorite channel is now secretary Kennedy and of people in the vice president vance team that are daily watchers

people that are part of president Trump's team as well kennedy's and others so it's amazing it's been great to watch the growth of the channel and I've often told people that you know you guys platform and put on a range of voices of independent voices uh you know the it's good you know aran mate i disagree with him on some some issues he comes more from the left perspective but a very thoughtful guy did great investigative journalism on syria uh you followed up russia gate what he exposed on syria was politzer worthy uh in terms of the fake chemical weapons attacks the rest the like you can disagree with folks but without it evolving into uh some of the things we've seen uh in europe uh such as they might show up at your door and arrest you uh so

You guys might need to relocate a little bit outside of the continental borders these days. Robert, is it true that you got the exact confirmation votes for Gabbard and for Kennedy? You called the exact number? So I put out that there would be exactly 52 Senate confirming votes for Robert Kennedy and for Tulsi Gabbard and cashed on both of those. Those are great pitch that the weathered President Biden would pardon any of his family members, dropped to 50 to 1 on inauguration day. And I kept telling everybody,

Biden's going to wait until the last possible minute because he needs to make sure they get all their crimes in. It's like, you know, it's not just to be late on the news story. It's like, hey, guys, come on, James. Come on, you know, sister loss. Come on everybody. Get in those crimes.

You know, sell those pardons. I'm not even going to issue, but people who think I'm going to issue to them. You know, get it in before noon on the 20th, because that's what I'll pardon you. And so a bunch of people have made a bunch of cash on those pardons. But yeah, it's fun.

It's interesting seeing in live time how these political markets might tell a different story, these betting markets might tell a different story than the media is trying to tell you. That's why there's been great efforts to suppress it, whether it's polymarket globally, K-A-L-S-H-I in the United States.

Look to those markets because they might tell you something different than what the New York Times narrative wants to be, for example. Great point. I will have all of Roberts' links in the description box down below and as a pinned comment.

Thank you once again, Robert Barnes for joining us. Take care, everybody.