The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - A Concerning Update to the Russian Reach Series || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Well, the Russian Reach series needed an update, and it's not a pretty one. The infiltration of the US government by Russian interests is growing and I don't see an end in sight.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/a-concerning-update-to-the-russian-reach-series

Hey, all Peter Zine here coming to you from Atlantic City. Today we're going to update a series that we did last month called the Russian Reached. What looked at the logic and the actions of the Russian government and how they were attempting and probably successfully attempting to penetrate deep into the American government, right up to and including the White House. So the purpose of this is to give you an idea of how much has evolved in just the last three or four weeks. And it's unfortunately a very long list. First off, keep in mind that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is somebody who most of the intelligence community who has thought of as a Russian agent for quite a few years.

And one of the first actions that she, well, let me put it this way. If she's not a Russian agent, she's probably a traitor because the then diagram of her worldview in Vladimir Putin's are pretty much identical. I mean, there might be a little bit of not overlap, like a half of 1%. But that's largely just hairstyles because, you know, Putin is bald and Gabrude's hair is fabulous. Anyway, she's pretty much completed gutting the counterintelligence arms of our various intelligence agencies. So most of those staff aren't even doing the jobs that they once did, allowing the Russians to really plow into American society. However, they want. Also, the Trump administration has largely dismembered the part of the intelligence community and the State Department that were there to protect our election integrity from Russian intervention.

Same thing for web hacking. and the Department of Justice has largely stopped investigating white-collar crimes, most notably fraud and cryptography. Cryptography, wrong word, like Bitcoin scams, which are another way that the Russians really, really enjoy getting their claws into American society and the American government. We basically just stopped enforcing those laws. The same goes for white-collared crimes in general, which, of course, for a country like Russia that is corrupt and uses as intelligence systems

to undermine societal stability all around the world, is something that has made their job a lot easier. The next big issue is, of course, Signalgate. Now, Signalgate happened back in March, mid-March, when the United States was preparing military assaults against the Houthis, which are the militant group in Yemen, and basically the entire top tier of the American national security team,

including defense and intelligence, and Gabbard, of course, basically participated in a chat on the Signal chat program. Signal is a platform that's supposedly secure, but the week that this all went down, the Defense Department's internal intel indicated that the Russians had probably hacked the encryption protocols. So basically, the American National Security apparatus were all using what had become an unsecured platform to communicate, basically, operational intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, again, testified about halfway through the revelations to Congress that this really wasn't a big deal and no one should be overly concerned about it. Of course it's not.

All right, let's see what's next. Rick Grinnell, he is an on-again, off-again, semi-diplomat who is working for the Trump administration. He worked for Trump, one, did a really bad job, basically just went around talking to German neo-Nazis the whole time, so the Germans wouldn't deal with him at all. Anyway, he's back in the administration now, and he's one of those people that is so unlikable that even Donald Trump doesn't like to have him around in person. So he kind of hovers outside of the West Wing and is basically spewing anti-Ukrainian Russian propaganda in the ears of Trump Jr. because he can't get the ear of Trump himself. Specifically, he likes talking about the Budapest Agreement, which was something that dates back to the immediate post-Cold War years when the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons. Basically, Grinnell is spouting the Russian equivalent of that deal. interpretation of it 15 years on and basically trying to get the Trump administration to

disenfranchise Ukraine as a state and suggesting that they've never had a claim to anything in the first place, which is of course exactly what the Russians would love the Trump administration to believe. Let's see. Next up, we've got Peter Navarro, who is the manufacturing advisor to the president, very pro-tariff guy. He started using Russian propaganda that has been recently designed and really into the ecosystem that's specifically targeting Canada. So Navarro has always been an anti-free trader. Don't really have a huge problem with that. But it's interesting to see Russian propaganda popping up in his statements on TV now

that are very, very specifically tailored to a very specific issue that really wasn't an issue in the Russian propaganda sphere until just a few weeks ago. Then we have Donald Trump reporting Russian propaganda on everything from broad strategic issue, to very tactical issues. So, for example, near the end of March, Trump started talking about how Ukrainian troops in Kursk had been encircled by Russian forces and, you know, this or that should happen.

I mean, that never happened. The Ukrainians were able to withdraw from the Russian province of Kersk fairly, I don't want to say easily, but without a lot of casualties. And in fact, that withdrawal had been completed more than 48 hours before Trump is supposedly asking the Russians to modify.

their operations in Kursk. So this is something that actually came from internal Russian Federation propaganda. It was designed to shape attitudes within Russia itself, but somehow it got on Trump's desk. If I was a guessing man, I would say that that probably happened to be a gabber directly. On Greenland, the Russians are trying to convince the Maga Spear that a joint invasion, Russians in the North and Americans in the South would be a keen idea, something that would obviously shattered NATO overnight and end America's defense alignments with the Scandinavian countries that in my opinion are going to be the future of the American Alliance Network in Europe, which of course is something that the Russians love to see destroyed. You may have heard

of Tim Poole. He is a far-right influencer that's very tight in the maguspace. He has a number of podcasts and video logs, kind of like me a little bit. He's been basically, indicted, I think is the technical term, for taking somewhere between $400,000 and $10 million from the Russian state. Basically, they're shoving money into his platform to help spread disinformation throughout the American Magasphere. He claims he didn't realize that it was going on. That's his official stance, and the investigation is impending. But, you know, he has on any given day somewhere between a number of followers similar to me and twice as many. And I can guarantee you that if $100,000 per video release that I did suddenly showed him on my bank account, I would not

need the FBI to tell me to investigate the shit out of that. So let's just say I don't take him very seriously. But the most important part of this is that Tim Pool is now part of the White House press pool. The Trump administration has brought him into the inside while kicking out those liberal rags like AP and successful farming. And then finally, a name that you may have started to hear bouncing around Alexander Dugan. He is basically a run-of-the-mill Russian fascist who has been advising Vladimir Putin for over a decade now, basically making up the ideology to justify genocide against anyone they feel is necessary. And until a year ago, most of his ritual was ultimately reserved for the United States. So preemptive nuking death camps. That

sort of thing. He's a real peach. Anyway, he has started making the rounds of MAGA publications in the United States recently. And of course, the first one in the world, the first of the big ones that he did was none other than Tucker Carlson. Now, you guys may remember Tucker Carlson used to be a Fox News host. Tucker has been fired from every media job he has ever had for lying on air about things on purpose. And since he left Fox, he is now basically migrated directly into the orbit of Russian propaganda, and most of his shows deal with Russian propaganda from sharing it with the world point of view. Perhaps the most concerning thing I have in the information space as regards to the Trump administration is not this Tim Poole thing, although that's not minor. But this is the American administration throughout history that has had the least

contact with the media of any form. It's not just that they're not talking to more liberal groups, like, say, the New York Times, they're not really talking to Forbes or Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. They've basically shut out everybody. But many members of the Trump cabinet have done extensive one-on-ones with Tucker Carlson. So we basically have a gutting of the normal means by which an administration would normally interact with the country and focused on a very, very few avenues of which the bigger ones are already in the Russians' pocket. It. Anyway, I don't have a lot of great news on that front, and I will leave everyone to their own

recognisance as to what's going to happen next.