The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1325: Multipolar Globalism w/ Keith Preston

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

68 MinutesPG-13Keith Preston is the proprietor of AttackTheSystem dot com and a college professor.Keith joins Pete to talk about how multipolarism will keep the structure of globalism within its influence.AttackTheSystem.com Keith's BooksPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I'm good. Good to be back. Cool, man. Well, just, just, Just to jump right in. The recently, a couple of, a couple of my friends started talking about how they, they thought the GOP was basically giving states away. And that rather than this young upstart group of people who don't care about Israel take over the party, they'd rather just torpedo the party altogether. And you said you saw some merit in that, but you thought a more interesting thing was this whole talk about a switch to, to multipolarity throughout the world.

And just basically how that doesn't really look, it doesn't really look good for a power because a lot of the structures that are in place within are not going, are not seeking. to be changed. So anywhere you want to jump off, go ahead. Well, on the question of multilateral, one thing that I think a lot of people are missing is what's actually happening on an international level. There's this prevailing view that you find in some people, among some people who follow these things that were shifting towards a multipolar world. And by that, they mean, well, the Chinese are becoming more powerful and the Russians are becoming more self-assertive, that the United States isn't quite the global hegemon it was, say, immediately after the Cold War. But I think there's a lot more

to it than that. If we look at the system that was created after the end of the Cold War, it was largely a matter of taking the liberal internationalist order that the Americans put together after World War II and then expanding it globally. And there was a book, published in the late 90s called Empire by a couple of left-league scholars who talked about how this world empire was developing that involved the integration of the financial and trade systems of different countries. And this was back during the time when the anti-globalization movement was emerging. I don't know how old your typical listener is, but back in 1999, there was the Battle of Seattle.

There used to be protests whenever the IMF and the World Bank and these kinds of us. My buddy Carl Dahl, who comes on the show and talks mostly about the Spanish Civil War when he comes on. He was on the ground for that. So he's talked about it a bunch. Oh, yeah. Well, that, you know, for all for younger readers, there was a wave of protest against

these international financial institutions about 25 plus years ago. And this was when really at the peak of what. Well, it was at the top of what I call the six peaks. I have this term I use called the six peaks. And that was the era of peak unipolarity, that is, American global dominance, peak globalization, which is the integration of trade on an international level. Peak neoliberalism, which was sort of the economic ideology behind this, the Washington consensus and all of that.

peak neoconism, you know, this neocon idea of the end of history and that, you know, we're going to have global democratic revolution and all of this kind of stuff, which takes off on steroids during the George W. Bush era. And then peak democratism, where liberal democracies, democratic republics are becoming more and more commonplace worldwide. And then peak what I call totalitarian humanism of this kind of managerial. soft authoritarian political framework that's fused with this nominally progressive cultural orthodoxy. All of those things were really at their apex in the late 90s. And then for the last 25 years, what we've seen is a gradual erosion of all of that. And largely, it's because of the pernicious effect that American powers had on much of the world. And I think that if we look a good analogy to use as to a corporation, like if we look at the history of a lot of multinational corporations like General Electric or Unilever or IBM or Nestle,

over time a lot of these corporations shifted their managerial structure where they were no longer a traditional top-down CEO, uh, centralized managerial system. started going to more regionalized and more decentralized systems of management to various degrees. And I think something is happening nowadays on an international level, or the international order is going in the same way. And essentially what we're seeing is that the United States is getting fired as the CEO of Globalism Incorporated or Imperialism Incorporated or New World Order,

incorporated or whatever terminology for because what's fascinating about it is that if you if you had as a goal the weakening of American prestige and power and all of that to the point that the United States cannot be a global hegemon how would you do it well you would encourage American leaders to you know attack allies and alienate supposedly friendly countries attack trading partners that do all kinds of things that don't really make a lot of rational sense when it comes to

maintaining American political, military, economic power. And that's exactly what we've seen going on in recent times. We've seen that they'll attack attacks on NATO, attacks on Canada, you know, this thing about taking Greenland and all of that. Now, what's interesting

is that the liberal internationalist wing of the American ruling class recognizes this. They recognize that the impact of all of these things is to weaken American power and prestige, which they want to maintain. That's why they're getting upset about, oh, they're alien leading our European Arab allies. They're destroying the rules-based international order. All of these things we can read about in the Atlantic. We can watch the war war, can read what state it from, and hear people ringing their hands about this.

But they're not wrong when they say that's happened. But the question is, why is that happened? And it's being sold to the American public as a matter of making America great again, nationalism. We're not going to waste time with these freeloading Europeans. We're not going to bother with all this international mall framework. We're America. We can do what we want. But it's not really having that effect.

The actual effect that all of that has happened. It's having, is weakening and isolating. in the United States as a nation state. But it's being sold as nationalist, making America great again to the general public and to the sectors of the elite or perhaps intermediary level elite that believe in nationalism,

that you want to have a Teddy Roosevelt and the type of nationalism. But the big picture-wise, I think the United States is getting fired as the CEO and management of the world order is being transferred to regional powers and regional agglomerations. That's why we see the rise of bricks. We see the Gulf Corporation Council rising.

We see medium-level powers like Indonesia, Turkey rising. We see China building its network of economic partnerships. Now, because all of this is happening, though, that doesn't mean we're actually moving towards real. geopolitical, multipolarity in an absolute sense. Because we're still in a

system of financial unipolarity. An analogy could be made to the 19th century. Look at the world order of the 19th century. You see that you had a number of major empires or rising empires. You had maybe 10 or 12 of the east. There was

obviously the British Empire, which is the biggest one in the French, you know, the Russian empire, the Ottomans, America was a rising continental power. Japan was rising here at that period. You know, all of the other European colonial empires. So you had these different empires that had their own steers of influence, which is a phrase that's made a comeback now. But it was still financially united for the city of London,

you know, through the financial apparatus of the British Empire. And nowadays, what we're seeing is something. something similar, where we're seeing a world where all these different powers might have their own spheres of influence, whether it's China, Russia, the European Union, America, Tartu, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, et cetera. But we see that there's a growing effort to integrate the eastern west and morph itself financial systems. And we see that through entities like Black Rock and all of these financial institutions. Like, I know on Toddler, Lewis's program, I did a program where I was talking about this, and he titled that the New World

Order is here, it turns out it's Black Rock. And that's not too far off, because that's what's actually, seems to be what's actually happening. Like, if a look at who's actually running the Trump administration, in my view is that ultimately it's the BlackRock and an international finance wing of the administration that's really called shots. For instance, Larry Fink, the leader of Black Rock, has actually gotten involved in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Now, why is a business fan leading the negotiations between two major countries involved in a war? Because that's where the real power is. Real power is with global finance in a way that transcends national borders.

We're seeing transfer of power or management between transfer of management to a lot of the regional corporations. You know, we've got the your opinion, got the bricks, you know, we've got the GCC and all of that. But it's not necessarily national states that are really thought shots.

National states still exist to power and influence and still do things. But over and above that, you have a layer of transnational finance that's increasingly a governmental system of its own. And that's currently being restructured where

globalism or globalization, that's not going away. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's being integrated, north, southeast, and west are being integrated through international, transnational, financial institutions, whether it's investment firms like BlackRock, whether it's the bank of international settlements, WTO, the World Bank, all of that apparatus is still there. It's just that the management structure is being altered. and to do that, for that to happen,

American influence and prestige and power has to be, has to recede. You know, the U.S. has to get fired, essentially, a CEO of the New World Order. But the general public is not going to go to that. Much of the elite is not going to go to that in the United States. So it's being sold as nationalists. It's being sold as, well, make America great again. But we're not making America great again. We're making America to a province of global finance.

Well, it's interesting that a lot of people would argue that, you know, you can't be a military empire. But, you know, the same argument can be made that you're, if you're trying to build a financial empire, which, you know, already exists, but now you're trying to, I guess, refine it. I mean, how do you? The only way to refine it would be to bring it home in some way, shape, or form. but that doesn't seem like they, what they're, they're actually seeking to expand the financial empire. Yeah, exactly. I think they're trying to expand it into regions of the world

where previously hadn't really been expanded, particularly the global south. The focus now is on the global south. You know, it sort of, I think it seems to be the financial strategy is to integrate the north, the east and west financial systems for the collective purpose of going into the global south

and cannibalizing that. You know, we see, for example, what globalization has done to the United States economy in terms of hollowing out the industrial place and all of that kind of stuff. And it's had similar effects elsewhere, not quite as bad as here. I think the United States can get worse by that. But now we see this whole process being extended into Latin America and into Africa and into South Asia and the South Pacific.

So that's really what's happening now, I think, is that this financial system is being extended outward, which requires a greater degree of financial. integration between all these different regions and sectors. So the idea that globalism or globalization is dead is not true at all. If anything, the opposite is true. It's actually being expanded and integrated. And it seems to me the best way to sell that would be under the populist, you know, the populist label and get people excited that this is somehow going to improve.

their lives. Can you speak to that? How do you think that expanding financial empire is going to help the lives of the average American? No. No, the social economic conditions in the United States are going backward at high speed. What we're doing is we're seeing a return to the, you know, to the pre-grade depression era or to the 19th century in terms of class relations and in terms of disparities in terms

of wealth distribution. Like some people will say we're in a new guild, new guild at age now, at the dark. And we're starting to see a lot of the same kinds of problems that we saw in the industrial revolution. Like if you look at what happened to the industrial revolution, it was the mirror image of what's going on now with the digital revolution and the financial revolution in the sense that You saw the dislocation and disruption of longstanding ways of life. You saw very, very rapid technological change, very, very rapid socially cultural change.

You saw a lot of people losing their traditional livelihoods. In the instance, in the Industrial Revolution, you saw a lot of small farmers being run off of their land. You saw crafts people losing their livelihoods because they couldn't keep up with industrial manufacturing. And parallels to all of that are happening now with the same kind of effect. Like, I know way back in the 1990s, Sam Francis wrote about the phenomena of the post-Bujua proletariat. And what he meant by that is that while the old bourgeois class system has largely faded, at the time it had been displaced by managerialism by the managerial revolution. And now it's been synthesized with the digital revolution.

but that's creating something similar to a proletarian class of the type that emerged in the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. We don't call it that anymore. Now, we consider calling it the proletariat. We call it the precariet or the, we call them gig workers or, you know, or we call them the unemployed. But we see the same kind of situation going on. We see increasingly more and more people who cannot afford basic life commodities like, you know, housing. Housing is one at some degree of attention because it's unthinkable that somebody can buy a house in their 20s. You know, like my parents, by the time my parents were in their early 30s, they'd already been through two houses.

You know, nowadays you've had people in their 50s that still can't buy a house. You know, at home ownership was always one of those things. that was associated with middle class status in the United States. But you see that all of that is declining now. That's due to the re-proletarization of labor, where you don't really have this kind of middle class, what was called the middle class, but this upper strata working class that emerged in the post-war period.

You don't have that anymore. One thing that was unique about the American economy in the post-war period is that you had a working class that for the first time in history could live like the upper middle class. class and not just like the upper middle class, but also mid to late 20th century technology, you know, household appliances and TVs and all that. I mean, we still have, we have more technology now than we ever had, but the overall living standards have not kept pace with that.

And, you know, we're starting to see the kind of things in developed countries, particularly in the United States, that you normally associate with the third world, like rows of people living in tents along the highway and that kind of stuff. Like people used to associate that kind of stuff with town cutta back in the day. That kind of stuff is becoming more commonplace, but it's very similar to what the effects of the Industrial Revolution were on Europe and America when that was going on. And we're seeing a very similar set of circumstances emerging at the private of time.

So none of that is making America great again. One reason why this kind of populist rhetoric has an appeal is because more and more people are noticing this and living this. And when they hear things like, well, we want to protect jobs or we want to rebuild the economy and things like that. Yeah, of course, that sounds good. But that's not really what's happened. That's how it's being sold. I mean, for example, Donald Trump, now I wouldn't say Donald Trump is in on some kind of conspiracy. He strikes me as somebody who just basically believes whatever, somebody.

last told him or whatever he last heard himself say. But I think that he's being used as sort of a tool to facilitate this process of transition away from American legitimacy towards this kind of system of theoretical multilaterality, but really it's a managed system of international finance. And the populism is being weaponized for that purpose. One thing we have to remember is that elites will put out whatever kind of message that serves their own interest at the time. For example, the woke phenomenon. You know, my take on the woke thing is that that was really just the liberal wing of the ruling class,

seizing on the ideas they picked up from campus culture and the left-wing activist culture, and then using that as their self-legitimate ideological superstructure. And then they sort of had somebody like Barack Obama as their front of, frontman. That was sort of the dominant paradigm for a while. Then that started to wear out. And then one thing that was interesting is that a few years ago, we started seeing an ostensible lurch rightward by a lot of elites, particularly after October 7th. I think that was a really a critical moment, October 7, 2023, because we saw a lot of Zionist elites lurching rightward and saying, okay, well, we've been pushing the woke line now. We see all these people who took us

out our word and now they're out protesting genocide in Palestine. So now we've got to do something about that. So let's lurch rightward and pick up on this conservative anti-woke thing and that's going to be our superstructure. And then you also

start to see a lot of rising sectors within the capitalist class or the elite or where do you want to call them. You start to see them moving in these accent direction. I mentioned Black Rock. Black Rock has been backing the trumpet in the Larry Fink was one of the billionaires that accompanied Trump on his trip to Saudi Arabia last summer.

Five years ago, Black Rock was pushing ESG and BLM and all the boutique woke causes of the period. Now they're moving rightward or but they have their hands in both. You see that with a lot of these tech oligarchs. These were the same people that were throwing people off of social media for challenging COVID orthodoxy or being too politically incorrect a few years ago, now they're giving Trump money so he can build his ballroom or whatever. It's, you know, all of these things are transactional. They'll put out any paradigm that suits the narrative of the moment that they want to spend.

And, I mean, they would become Islamists if they thought it would, you know, if they would become Marxist, if they thought it would serve their own interest at the time. And that's kind of where we are now. you mentioned the industrial revolution and one thing about the industrial revolution is was it was something that you could see and you can hold um you know people moving to cities spangler comparing it to like people living in barracks because you know you're going to work they don't know if they're coming home that day but at least at that one thing that you didn't have at that time was the financialization of the economy that you have now basically the economy that you have now basically the economy is something that can't be seen. It's all ones and zeros. It's all dollars. It's all derivatives. It's all and at that at the time of the Industrial Revolution, you could still own your home. You could still own your land and have like dominion over your land. Now your land is basically owned by the county or the

bank or you never own it. And it's just as bad as it was during the Industrial Revolution, when you look at what's going on now, it's so, it's hanging on by a thread because it's all financialized. There is nothing real about it. I mean, Michael Burry is betting against Palantir, betting against AI, saying that this is all made up, that this is all a front, this is just to make money, this is just to loot the treasury, this is just getting investors to give money that they're just going to steal and take from them. Yeah, and they'll keep doing that until at all. collapses until we get another great depression type of scenario. That's exactly where things are headed now.

They're building this financial house of cards. It's all going to come crashing down eventually. And that's when we're going to have real problems. So, yeah, I mean, when you, I believe that there are actual wars going on between the elites. I mean, you know that there are factions out there. You have the Zionist faction. You have the financial faction with crossover. You have the Silicon Valley that has crossover into all three.

But there are people out there who are, there are groups out there who are making plays at trying to tear down exist or trying to basically have more influence over any administration that comes in there than the other illicit. elite factions. So you do see that there are, there, there is a war amongst the elites now more than there was, say, 20 years ago. Oh, yeah. Well, there's always been conflict within the elites. There was a really good book that was published 50 years ago called the Yankee Calvoy War by Carl Olensby, who was a former defense worker who sort of became an anti-war guy in the 60s. But it's been In the 70s, he wrote about how much of American political conflict of that era could be understood as the conflict between the traditional eastern establishment, that is, the Rockefeller types and the northeastern financial elites.

And then the rising Sunbelt, you know, like the industrial expansion that had happened in the Sunbelt and the post-war era leading up to that. And that would be things like defense contractors and agribusiness and Texas oil and all. And initially, Silicon Valley was part of that as well. And that's sort of where the whole liberal versus conservative conflicts, say in the 70s and 80s came from. You know, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, some of those political figures came out of the Sunbelt wing at the Illy. And they started mounting a challenge to the northeastern establishment. Now, prior to the Reagan era, the Rockefeller's pretty much of the United States.

The Republican Party was run by Nelson Rockefeller, the Democratic Party. party was run by his brother, David. So, and the, what the Reagan revolution was, in part, in part was the Sunbelt becoming more assertive and is asserting itself into the political sphere. And the Sunbelt represented the more industrial wing of the ruling class and then the northeast represented the more financial wing. And that conflict goes all the way back to the turn of the 20th century. So it's not like it's needed even at the time.

But now we've seen other layers. and other sectors added. The tech revolution is probably the most important thing because eventually Silicon Valley became a force of its own. And initially, it looks like Silicon Valley aligned itself with the eastern establishment to a large degree. But then the more powerful and influential, the Silicon Valley elite became,

the more they started spreading themselves out. And they started seeing factions of Silicon Valley in both the Democrats' and Republicans and within liberal and conservative groups and all of that. Yeah, you see that everywhere. A lot of people would be surprised to hear this perhaps, but some of these social democratic politicians like AOC and so on, Mamdami, and people like that, the real material base of those kinds of people

isn't the working class or poor or that kind of stuff. It's more the lower levels of the tech industry and then what might be called the left wing of the petty bourgeoisie, that is more media-level enterprises that are in competition with larger, more established enterprises, and also the professional managerial class, the Yubby class. That's the real material foundation of progressive Democrats, as opposed to the neoliberal centrist Democrats or the Republicans.

So the Silicon Valley types are now, the tech revolutionaries are spreading. themselves out. I think the top level of that would be the people like Musk and Teal and some of those guys and Mark Zuckerberg, and they've sort of lurched rightward and grown in their lot of the Republicans and tried to embed themselves in that. And then there's also financialization. And you have, out of that, you have this whole new wave of financiers and financial elites that are in some ways aligned with, in some ways in competition with, and even some ways eclipsing. more older financial elites while sort of dragging them along with them at the same time.

Again, I keep coming back to BlackRock, but they're as good example of that as anything. Initially, they were one of these startup financial entities, and then they started becoming competitive with entities like, you know, the traditional Chase Manhattan, you know, a child type of entities. And then they've largely matched that, even eclipsed it in some ways, but they're still interconnected with it, or overlap. But then they've also lurched rightward and started aligning themselves with the sunbelt and the heavy industry and that kind of stuff as well. And, of course, then there's the Zionist plutocrats.

A lot of people think Zionism is a monolith conspiracy. It's really not. It has multiple factions like anything else. And one important distinction that has to be made there is between the Israeli national. what I call the Israeli nationalists, and then the global, the asperianist. Somebody like Benjamin Netanyahu, and then all of his friends and champions in America,

the Lindsey Graham's, Mike Hookabees, those people are Israeli nationalists. What they care about is creating greater Israel throughout Western Asia and then creating a network of sea traps and other states around it. Now, that's what Israel's foreign policy is about under the Lekud. And then they've also become more extreme.

I mean, they really, really, really, really, really, Kahana's part, you know, Bahia Khahia. That's what, that's basically what the Israeli government is now. Think of the Israeli government today. It's like a Jewish version of the Ku Klux plan or something. That's what they are. And a lot of the hardcore Israeli partisans in the United States today, that's what they are.

You know, that's what the Lindsey Grounds and the Mike Huckabees and Tom Cotton's and all these kinds of characters are. But the global diaspora Zionism is, It's more concerned about Zionist influence on an international level. It's not the other against Israel, it's not that against Israeli expansionism. But they don't see that as the primary issue. They see Israel more as a nexus that's a connector between east and west within a global Zionist empire of the type they want to create.

If you look at the countries of the northern hemisphere from, say, Russia all the way over to Australia, all right you have well Australia is technically not more than but it's western um culturally at least um all of those have the same kind of Jewish oligarch classes you know the Russians have that their their enemies and Ukraine have that the Europe has that the UK has that Canada has that the United States obviously has that Australia has it and while they're not necessarily in agreement about everything it's not some monolithic conspiracy there is a prevailing consensus that, you know, in favor of Jewish hegemony and Jewish power, and by extension, the Zionist project and the Zionist ideology. So the endgame there would be a worldwide Zionist empire that's transnational, where it's Zionist elites are interconnected, interconnected through whatever countries in which they're deeply embedded. So you have a Zionist empire by default, even if you don't call it that, you know, that's what

it amounts to. And as far as the parts of the world that aren't impacted by that, mostly it's East Asia, mostly it's Japan and China and those kinds of places. And now we see Zionism expanding into the global south and trying to create public states in Africa and Latin America. We have this thing, for example, going on in Latin America called the Isaac Accords, which is basically a Latin American version of the Abraham Accords, which is basically just about trying to create

what amounts to Zionist puppet states in different regions. And we see that in Africa. We see the same in roads of that type being made in Africa. For example, when you've got it, that's an obvious in Somalia, Somalia land now. We see this happening in South Asia. We see traces of this now in the Philippines and Thailand.

So Zionism is deeply embedded in institutions worldwide. People say, well, how was Zionism so influential as it's so powerful? Because of the trans-institutional, transnational embedment, you know, it's not that there's a single world Zionist monarch given the orders or something. It's through cultural hegemony, that is a result of institutional hegemony. Well, this would be a good place to just divert for a second, because before we started recording, asked you what you thought the you thought the most important things that come out of that you've

seen out of the Epstein drop so far we're doing that we're recording this the Monday after the weekend where yeah they release it on a Friday and then just go nuts through the weekend trying to figure it out talk a little bit about what you've seen in in these Epstein releases that relates to exactly what you were just talking about well the kinds of people that were associated with Jeffrey Epstein were exactly the kinds of people I was just described. These were global, financial, cultural, institutional elites. I mean, that represent the full spectrum of institutions. Some of the names that have come out, Larry Summers, who was he, he was Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He was the president or channel with the title, was chancellor or president of Harvard.

Was he Harvard or he had one of those? You know, obviously Alan Dursowitz, you know, high-powered attorney. We know this association with Epstein, the former prime minister of Israel, Erhard Barack, Lex Wexner, a lot of prominent European financiers. Richard Branson, who's a big British capitalist. He owns Virgin Airlines, probably the thing he's most known for. And I'm going to go down a long list of these people, but we see how these people were intricately connected as part of the same social service, part of the same cultural milieu. One thing, when listening to journalists talk about the actual files and all the stuff that was in it, it reminded me a lot of a book that was a classic in sociology as published back in early 60s,

maybe in the late 50s or the 60s. I can't remember when. But it's by Seawright Mills. It's called the Power Elite. And Seawright Mills at the time examined the American Powerer, as it was. And he talked about how, you know, yeah, ostensibly you have democracy or constitutional republic, whatever, but the strings are really being pulled by this power elite. And these people circulate, you know, for example, some of them may be at the top of the military.

He was writing during the Eisenhower era. Some of them may be at the top of the military, some of maybe at the top of the financial institutions, you know, the industrial institutions. also there's the cultural institutions like elite universities and all of that kind of stuff like how many elites have gone to Yale and Harvard, for instance, in these places. And they

circulate among themselves. We still see that today. Somebody's at Congress for a while, then they have a seat on the board of directors at a major corporation. Then they become chancellor of a major university. And you see people going in and out of the military of these like that.

There's also the media. Somebody used to be in Congress. Now they're a major commentator on MSNBC or Fox or one of these network news programs. But that's what C. Wright Mills called the power relief. Or another term for it is a circulation

of the elites. There was a sociologist named Moscow, a Italian that lived in the 20s or 30 somewhere like that. These are talked about this, a lot of circulation of elites. But if you look in the Epstein files, You see who these people are, basically. You see that they're all drawn from all these different elite institutions.

And you see that they all, to a large degree, they knew each other. They were part of the same social circles. You know, top level business people, top level financial people, top level politicians, presidents, several U.S. presidents, you know, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, heads of state of other countries, you know, media figures, leading academics, press people, high-powered lawyers. That's the power elite. And the power of these people is their institutional embedded,

the way that they are to a large degree, part of the same broad circle, but then they're spread across different kinds of institutions, whether it's the universities, whether it's a media conglomerate, whether it's a major corporation, whether it's a government agency, whether it's the presidency, see, and that's who the power lead are. And we see a lot of them are some pretty creepy people, too, from some of the revelations.

Well, one thing that really stood out to me is that, you know, these aren't people who are just getting on the phone with each other and conspiring. These are people who have actually built social capital, you know, in person. And I mean, yeah, it's pretty gross and disgusting and illegal in a lot of cases, which helps keep people tight-knit. But the fact that these people know each other and they know each other's families and they know that really speaks to the fact of just exactly how tight-knit it is and that if you think that you're going to somehow, you know, vote just the right guy in and the right guy is going to be able to dismantle this,

especially if that person has been a part of it, you're probably a little bit delusional. Yeah, well, it's like a casino. It's like no matter who the ostensible winner is, the real winner is the house. You know, the house always wins. Maybe not in Trump's case because he actually bankrupted the casino, which I don't even know how that's possible.

But, you know, he did do it. so. But yeah, I mean, yeah, the whole voting thing, it's like I've never been that big on electoralism as a form because that's what you're doing. You're voting for, you know, essentially, well, it's kind of like pro wrestling. You know, it's kind of like pro wrestling is set up where, you know, you have characters that are pretending to be, you know, Dr. Evil versus, you know, plus a good guy or something. And, you know, and then you have the commentators, the announcers that pretend like this is a real sport, you know, even though they're in on it too

and know what's happening. And that's kind of how the political, you know, that's how liberal democracy works at practice. It's sort of like a cave wrestling match. Free selected candidates largely screened by, you know, different sections of the elite.

And then they're put out there to play this contest that insult each other and that kind of stuff. But at the end of the game, the House still wins. Like, well, again, back to Larry Fing. He said that before the 2024 election. Somebody asked him, you know, who do you think is going to win or who do you want to win the Trump Harris election? He said, well, who cares? You know, we're going to win regardless. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about it. People hear that and they think that, oh, well, I know for a fact that this person doesn't like

that person. Well, you're always going to have that. You're always going to have people where their personalities just clash, you know? I mean, I don't know that Trump doesn't really like AOC, but I'm assuming that maybe they don't get along. And even if they don't, it doesn't matter. It doesn't, you're, you know, it's, you're in this box and you're arguing about things, you know, it's, I mean, just talking about, I'm basically parroting Chomsky. You're allowed to talk and argue as much as you want inside this box. But as soon as you try to leave that box, you know, I mean, bullets could literally fly. Well, I mean, there are members of families who don't like each other personally.

You know, they're still part of the same family. And the same is true of ruling clicks. Individuals might not be able to stand each other, but they're still part of the same system and the same institutions. You know, again, it's not that it's all some monolithic conspiracy. It's simply that this is the way systems of power operate and where the way power is distributed. Yeah.

And once you get into the ranks of the elite, whether you're born into it or whether you somehow find your way, having worked into it, you still have to play the game to some degree. Like a lot of people say, well, why is it all these politicians that say good things as soon as they get elected, they seem to sell out, compromise? Because that's how the game was playing. You know, you do one thing to get there. You do something else when you're actually there. That's the game. and a lot of people don't understand that that's just how it is.

You know, like, for example, take Trump, for example, right now, what's the big thing going on in this country? It's all the ICE and the anti-ice protests and all that. Now, whatever one thinks about the immigration issue and all that, or ICE, that's a separate question. But my take on that is that, first of all, what the administration is doing is largely, theatrical production. It's

performance. Because when you build up this ice apparatus as a supposed immigration enforcement agency and you send it to the depths of the

blue zone, of blue country, after this Somali fame, you know, welfare fraud scandal or whatever it was just happened,

right? That's obviously going to play well with the MAGA base. They're going to love this stuff. They're going to think this is awesome. it's going to outrage the people that the Maga base hate.

It's going to outrage the left. It's going to outrage the champagne liberals and all of that kind of stuff. And there's going to be plenty of articles in the Atlantic about how awful this is. But it's going to make a debt in immigration. I mean, the only way you could curb immigration significantly in a society like the United States, that is one of the probably the third largest country in the world in terms of population, geographically one of the largest countries in the world. For the time being, still one of the richest countries in the world.

If you have American money, it goes a long way of the global south. The only way you're going to incurred immigration to a country like the United States is for the state to wage a massive war against the capitalist class. And we see that that never happens. Who is it that profits from immigration? It's not somebody working for less than minimum wage as a day labor somewhere. It's the hotel chains, it's the agribusiness corporations, it's the landlords, it's the major construction firms, all of these different types of businesses and industries that profit

from immigrant labor, either legal or illegal. You'd have to take that away to make an attempt in immigration. That's never going to happen because it's going to require a massive state action against the capitalist class across a lot of the different industrial and occupational sectors. How often do we hear about any business or any employer or any corporation being prosecuted for violating illegal immigration law? Almost never. There's probably 20 prosecutions like that per year in the United States. there have been some, I think there's been an increase of, you know, theatrical prosecutions of that type lately under Trump. But typically when prosecutions like that are done, they don't go after Tyson's chicken, they don't go after Marriott Hotel.

They go after back alley Asian massage parlors. You know, they go after sketchy Mexican restaurants. In fact, in the administration, Stephen Miller, I think there are other issues with him, but Stephen Miller was specifically instructing ICE, don't worry about criminals, those are too hard to track down. Just go where you could find the most numbers, you know, go find day labor places, go find illegals hanging out on the street in front of 7-Eleven or something. If that's going to create the optics, that's going to create the theatrical effect, They're also going to get more numbers that way, so it's going to look kind of sort of impressive. But the whole thing is just a theatrical production.

It's, you know, I mean, after, you know, within a year or two, if we look at the actual numbers, we're going to see not a dent in immigration. It may be on the margins, you know, but that's still going to be there. That issue is not going away because the only way to curb immigration is, through what I said, massive prosecution of industries and businesses and landlords. who facilitate illegal immigration, as well as a revocation of visas and things like that. It's not going to have a chamber of commerce. I mean, the Republican Party is the party of the Chamber of Commerce and the Petty Boot was the.

That's not going to happen. Well, I mean, especially since it'll be, it'll just be touted as anti-capitalist. And, you know, obviously capitalism is very right wing. You know, so it's like it's like, it's like, what? had that, had that happen. You know, it's like, that's like the people who want to say, oh, this particular group in history, you can't call them left wing or right wing because of economics.

Right. Well, I mean, that has a little something to do with it. But, I mean, really, more has to do with their attitude towards egalitarianism and things like that. Right. Right. But, but what, um, so if, like, it, it, what nobody is addressing, this is the one thing that, you know, people just don't want to talk about because everybody's living in the moment is you could do all these things. You could close the border

and it essentially seems like the southern border is closed at this point. Well, there are other reasons for that. Yeah. Well, you could, you could deport 10, 20 million people. But this, there's going to be an election this year. There's going to be election next year. There's going to be election in 2028. Everything is always changing. And you see, and this is the second time, this is the going into the fourth year where Trump has had the Supreme Court, the House, and the Senate, and they're not passing any laws. I mean, I'm not even saying laws mean anything anymore. I'm saying if you wanted to do something, you'd want to cement it in law to make change. And they're not only, they're not even doing that. They're doing it with a signature in an executive order.

which for the next president, even if they're a Republican, can overturn with another signature. So it's like, unless you're, you know, the way you have to, the way I look at it is, if you want to make real change, it has to be foundational. Because the whole voting thing is, you know, and they can just turn on voting machines. I mean, I think that's happened in the past. and change. They can change what's been done and overturn that in one day in November. And people don't want to address that. They want to address the fact that, oh, my guy's going to do this and everything's going

to be changed forever and everything's. No, politics is like, it's an eternal war. And people just don't want, especially under a liberal democracy as such as this. There's no such thing as a republic anymore. There's no Republican and oligarchy. So, I mean, how do you even plan for the future when you don't know what's coming? Yeah, well, right now we seem to be moving into a period in the United States. Or my first guess is that the political future will probably include a while swing to the left at some point.

And there's a number of things I base that on. One is simply the lesson of past partisan cycles. Like if you look at the history of presidential elections in the United States, going back to at least the 1880s, arguably you could apply this model to the pre-industrial era, but it gets a little murkier. But at least since the 1880s, which is the height of the second industrial revolution, right? you see that one party in the United States is typically dominant for about 40 years, then the other party is dominant 40 years, then is another 40-year cycle. So partisan cycles tend to run every 40 years.

And from about 1880 something up until now, we see that in the 40 years between the 1880s and 1920s, there were seven Republican presidential terms, three Democratic terms. that was Grover Cleveland's second term and the two Wilson terms. Then from the late 1920s through the late 1960s, there was Herbert Hoover's term and the two Eisenhower terms, and all the rest were Democratic terms. Then from the late 60s to the election of Barack Obama, there were exactly three Democratic terms, Jimmy Carter and the two Clinton terms. Right now, we're in the middle of what should be a Democrat-dominated 40-year cycle,

starting in 2008, 2009. Now, I don't think there's any law of history to say this has to continue definitely for the next 2,000 years or anything. But if past experience is any indication, right now we're in a period where the Democrats have had three terms, the Republicans have had two.

That means of the next five, one should be a Republican term and four should be Democratic terms. And I think it's very likely that at some point, either in 28, 2032, we'll see a wild swing left. And it's not just partisan cycles that I'm basing that on. One is rising class divisions.

There's a reason why the language of affordability worked for the Democrats in last year's election. It's a reason why people who claim to be socialist and things like that are increasingly becoming somewhat electable. We see that. We see the economic issues. We also see the demographic change, that is population groups that are inclined to vote with the Democrats are rising in size, rolling in size. People inclined to vote for the Republicans are shrinking demographic. And I've heard some Republican, I've heard some Republican candidates say, oh, but we picked up the Hispanic vote or we picked up the black vote in 2020.

Yeah, who cares? All right. That's an exception to the rule. In fact, the exception proves the rule. The fact that that's somehow noticeable or a big deal shows what the actual rule is. There's also generational change. I hear a lot of people from the right say, oh, well, young people are becoming more, you know, right-wing or whatever. No, they're not.

If you look at every opinion poll, young people are, you know, zoomers are the most left-lating population, and young millennials of the most left-lating population there is. So whether it's partisan cycles, economics, generations, culture, demography, all of this stuff points towards, you know, a greater advantages for the left coming up in the years and decades ahead. So I'm inclined to think it's going to be a wild sweet left word in some way. In fact, I hear more and more talk in liberal and left circles about when they get in next, they're going to go all out and wage war against the current. administration, they're going to put these people in jail, you know, it's, uh, and which they, you know, kind of sort of tried to do last time. And I think to have brought that, that may come back with a vengeance. So, yeah, this idea that, uh, the current administration is the,

is the savior of the right or something like that, you know, I mean, whether you're on the right or left, you know, I don't really think it's going to play out that way in a lot of them. Yeah. I took to say in a couple years ago that I thought that, you know, in the not too distant future, we were looking at either left or right-wing authoritarianism. And I'm thinking more and more that that's going to be left-wing. Yeah, well, I think the same thing, because in Marxist theory, there's this concept called Bono Martyrton. And what that means is a situation where you have divisions in the ruling class, that the ruling class is not able to work out among themselves, usually in response to some kind of crisis going on in the economy or in geopolitically or some mixture

of those. So what will happen is that a particular ruling class faction will step forward and sort of edge out the others, and then they'll put in an authoritarian political apparatus on there to manage whatever transitions are going to be made on their behalf. You know, if you read the book by

Karl Marx, the 18th for Mayor Louis Napoleon Bolivart, that's what that's about. That's what this term comes from. And it seems to me that what's going on right now in the United States

is you have different elite factions that are seeking a bone of heartism of their own. You know, whether they're actually half-watered. Like I've had I've had people ask me, usually people from the left, they said, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist? Like, no.

And is he a nationalist? No, he's a nationalist. You know, he's somebody that some elite factions would like to be a bonapartist on their behalf. Not that he is a bono partisan, but I think that's what some elite factions want. They want a bona fashism from the right. But there's also the such thing as a bona fartsism from the left. Like historically, in American politics, we could say that, that if we had examples of Bonartist presidents,

I'd say the three candidates would be probably Abraham Lincoln and the two Roosevelt's. Each of those three were fairly transformative during times when there were sharp divisions within the world of class. Those are probably the three examples, Bonapartist. You know, we can argue Nixon was an attempted bonoartism, but, and some people want Trump to be one. I don't think he qualifies quite yet,

sort of a proto bono artist or bono artists want to be. But yeah, I could see a bone of artisan from the left. And what a left bono artist regime in the United States would do is that they would work to consolidate power where we have a de facto one-party democratic state. I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be totalitarian, like, say, some union or even China today. but it would be more like the PRI in Mexico in the 20th century,

the institutional revolutionary party, because the way their system worked is you had a ruling party, you had a formal Democratic republic, and then you had opposition parties that were allowed to exist as controlled opposition, and you had elections and voting and all that, like in any liberal democracy. But the system was reigned so that the PRI always wanted,

and they won, you know, virtually nonstop for something like 70 years. And in the United States, it would certainly be possible to rig the system so that you have a one-party, Democratic Party state that is done for Bonapartist means. There's lots of ways you can do that, you know, with dust off Roosevelt's court packing scheme. You could add more states that are going to add more electoral votes for the Democrats. You could split up different states in, ways that are advantageous. You could do redistricting within states that are going to create more Democratic representatives. You could add Puerto Rico and all of that. Or we could do a way of the

electoral college altogether. There are some things that involve constitutional amendments that may be a little bit trickier. But there's all kinds of ways you could have this kind of bona partisan from the left if you had a ruling class or ruling class faction that was adamant about making this happen. Now, of course, it's possible to have something like that from the right as well, but I tend to agree with you that's less like. Because I don't really see the existing ruling class as one that would

want a bona fartsism right. There's just a range of vested interest that I think would, you know, obviously one of the most popular issues with the right nowadays, the populist right, the brown-level right, is immigration. And it's not in the interest of the power elite in the broad sense to restrict immigration to any significant degree.

I mean, what's in it for that? I can think of a lot of ways that would be harmful to their interest in not too many ways at which it would help them. And so they're not, you know, if you look at the party breakdown now, we see that the Democrats are really the party of the elite. I mean, there are plenty of elites in the Republic Party. I'm not saying that the Republicans are really a working class party. Some of them are trying to claim they are.

But the Democratic Party today is the party, first of all, of transatlantic, finance capital at the very top. And then it's the party of the general capitalist class, you know, the CEO Fortune 500 types. And then it's the party in the professional managerial class. You know, the all the, and it's all the ideas that you know, everything from Madison Avenue to the mass media, to the entertainment industry, universities and education. That's the Democratic Party today. And that is the party of the elite. Now on the Republican side, you also have sundown capital, you have tech oligarchs, you have financial oligarchs that have their hands in everything, you have defense contractors that have the hands and everything. They can go in any fraction. It doesn't matter to them. So that would be my prediction. My prediction would be that, yeah, I think at some point in the future we're going to see a swing to the left in the United States with the sectors of the left broadly defined. I'm defining the left broadly. I mean, if you're find the left merely as anti-capitalism note. It's going to be very, you know, state capitalist,

crony capitalist, you know, it's not going to be socialism or like that. But I think I do see something emerging eventually kind of like, well, like California. All right. I think that, you know, if you look at, if you imagine if California were nationalized and that was the national model in the United States, California is a Democratic Party one party state. I mean, you know, even, you know, Gavin Newsom couldn't get unrecalled in California. You know, I mean, if you're a Democrat to be voted out of office, you really have to screw up in before. And I think that the, you know, the nationalization of that model where I think the, if

imagine if the United States were to become more like the EU, this kind of, you know, model of technocratic governance, you know, within the context of a trade zone and currency Union only with a more Latin American-type class system and some of the kind of instability you see in Latin America as well. Like in Argentina, for example, the Peronist tradition. You've got the left Peronist and right Peronist and whatever else Peronist. But there's always this, you know, crazy back and forth while swings in different directions. You know, like right now, Malay is sort of challenging all of that. And I suspect eventually they'll get tired of him and they'll bring in something else. They'll go back to peronism or neo-peronism, paleo-pronism. But, yeah, so I see, I see America

going that way in the future. I see America's becoming sort of a hybrid of the EU and Latin America politically and economically, culturally in many ways. If financially things get worse and worse for the average person, and you have two parties that neither one is going to, you know, go to war against the capitalist class that is doing this, it's going to be whoever's narrative is best is going to win. And it always seems like in that case, the narrative on the left usually wins. And the demography and culture and generational evolution. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and you're bringing in people from other, you know, with the mass immigration, where people are really worried about what they're going to get for free and what kind of patronage networks are going to be set up for them. The right doesn't

set up patronage networks for the people who support them. And the left will give you, we'll give you a $300,000 a year, no-show sinecure job or get you elected to Congress. And the right just doesn't do this for the people, for, you know, the people who would want to support them. Yeah. Well, I think the problem the right has is that the right has too many in terms. contradictions that are pulling the right in all kinds of different directions at the same time. There's a lot more unity on the left, which is ironic, because the left actually has a more diverse coalition in demographically, but there's more ideological. I really don't know that it's more ideologically. It's more partisan. Yeah, I've noticed that, for example, in Congress,

the Democrats are a much more disciplined party in terms of just, organization and, you know, keeping members in line and policing their own ranks than the Republicans. The Republicans to just have a, well, I'll put it this way. I think that comes down to the political cultures of parties and the demographics they represent. I've been to Republican and conservative insider events, and I've also been to Democratic Party insider events, including visits to the homes of Democratic senators and stuff like that. And what I've noticed about the Democratic Party in its interior is that it's very similar to student government in high school.

A lot of people on the right have this idea that the Democrats are Marxist Revolutionaries or something. Now, you find that on the far left, perhaps, but the Democratic Party proper are technocrats, and the culture is very student government in high school. You know, it's more about careerism and status, and, you know, it's, it's, it's, it, and that kind of stuff. For what I've seen of Republican insider events, like, say, visiting CPAC and that kind of stuff,

it's basically a convention of used car sales. It's like everybody's got some hustle, some angle that they're working, but in a way that prevents actual disunity, because everybody, everybody, everybody else, you know, everybody's bad mouth, like everybody else behind the scenes. I mean, we see a lot of that, on right now, particularly in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. You know, a lot of the stuff going on on the right. And the right, I think, is just culturally

and institutionally much more disunited than the left. You know, the left culturally is somehow better able to police its own ranks and organized and work as a team in their interest to do so. Yeah. That's something that, um, that has become very clear. Do you know who Jeff Younger is? What Jeff Young? Jeff Young. I don't.

He's a guy from Texas who went through this whole thing where his, to get the laws changed about trans and kids in Texas because his wife decided she was going to trans, you know, their kid and everything. And he had no rights over it. She ended up taking him to, California where, you know, younger had absolutely no say. And he just became, he became entrenched in

Texas politics. And he, he just says that, like, you go to a left wing event. You go to, like, a Democrat Party event. And he went to a Democrat Party event and he said, I'm here because I'm interested to fight for trans kids rights. And they, like, walked him over to a table, said, talk to that person. We'll get you set up and we'll get you. He said, you go to a Republican. Republican event and say, I'm here for this specific thing. They're like, have a seat over there, buddy. Don't, don't even, don't try to change what we have going on here. Don't try to rock the boat here.

And, you know, he just had to become one of these guys who, like, if he wanted to get a politician out of office, he had to track down, like, their major donor and dig up dirt on that donor and then just go after people. And, you know, I mean, he just, he was really able to. on the ground. And if you know anything about Texas politics, it is one of the worst states. I mean, there's no such thing as a right-wing politician in that state in the Republican Party. I mean, it's all just graft and everything. And, you know, he just, I'll finish it, he just proved that the Democrat Party is way more organized and way more dedicated to their mission, even if it's

something horrific, as long as they have the power? Yeah, well, I think the issue there is that socially economically, the real base of the Republican Party is not the working class. It's the petty bourgeoisie. And that's the sector that's accustomed to seeing everything in terms of transactionalism. It's basically, how's this going to affect my bottom line? Well, okay, if I'm, all right, well, this guy over here, he's against trans rights or whatever. Well, is that going to affect my bottom line or not? Well, or maybe not, so forget that. Most Republicans are not driven by ideology.

There's this perception that some people on the left have that Republicans are mostly far-right-wing extremists, and they may be a little subcultures of that or something. But most Republicans, the real base of the Republican Party, which was the small capitalist, small corporation people, somebody that owns a regional chain of car dealerships and that kind of stuff. They only care about their bottom line. That's the party of the bottom line.

And even when you get to the more elite level, it's the Chamber of Commerce types. And again, it's all about what's good for business. Can we sell, can we sell? To them, politics is like a product. You know, can we sell us? And whatever the liabilities of trying to sell this. So it's all just about how it's going to affect their balance sheet. And the Democrats, based on my experience with, I know I was compared to the student government,

But they're also kind of like the Episcopal Church or maybe the Catholic Church or something like that in this sense that, yeah, there is a party line. There is a Howard. There is a system of authority. And there is a creed and there is a dog. And if you go against that, well, then we have ways of controlling that. I mean, you see that in the way that Democrats run their primaries, the party primaries. Like in the 2020 election, Andrew Yang has claimed, I don't know, it's true enough, Andrew Yang is a claim that during the primary debates that they were cutting off the microphones for him, Tulsi Gabbard, Marion Williamson, maybe Bernie Sanders, because they just didn't want them to speak. They wanted the House candidates, you know, not the Maverick candidates to be the speakers. Then when Bernie Sanders started winning in the Nevada primary, they, you know, Barack Obama got on the phone to all the House candidates. I said, okay, we need for you to pull back now. You know, people who judge because we're going with Joe now. you know, he's, these are going to be our lead man. And that's how they do things.

And they did the same thing with the 2024 primaries. You've had these Maverick candidates that entered the primaries. You know, you've had Robert Kennedy Jr. initially, Arnard Williamson again, and Shane from the Young Turks and people like that. And I think, was it Reed Hoffman? Not Reed Hoffman, it's a billionaire. Who was, there was another guy, sort of an obstentrous Democrat type. I didn't remember who he was.

Phillips something, Phillips, maybe, I don't know, but anyway, the Democrats basically said, but we're just not going to leave progress. And then when it became obvious that Biden couldn't function enough to get through the rest of the election, they just said, okay, well, we're just going to pull him out and we're going to put Kamalae and we're not going to do primaries. No, this is, it's like they're known at her homecoming, way, basically. And so that, but that, that represents a well-structured, well-organized, disciplined party, you know, if you If you want your party to be successful, you want them to be like that. I'm going to leave it there, man.

We could talk about this. We could go on about this forever. Yeah. Tell people where they can find your stuff, anything you want to plug. I have a website that I am the chief editor of, attacklotsystem.com, just like it's called attackthesystem.com. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter or X as it's called now. I'm on substact.

So, and you can Google my name and just find all kinds of stuff about me and see what enemies as well as friends say. Well, it was great catching up and thank you. Really appreciate it. Not a problem.