TRASHFUTURE - We’re Going to Cherish It feat. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

We talk about the Trump plan to bring stability to the Middle East by building hotels and casinos on top of the mass gravesite of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, and how it’s differences from the Biden plan are largely in its aesthetics. Also, the art of the deal in Ukraine, another cushy job in venture capital for an unqualified natsec goon (democrat), and what do you call a group of three or more people on the Labour Right… a WhatsApp scandal! Check out Seamus’s writing here! Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everyone and welcome to a new free episode of TF. We're doing that again. It is Riley. It is Milo Hussein November. And we are joined by, I want to say, the nine Pete, Seamus Malekovzeli. Seamus, how's it going? It's going great. Always happy to be back. We're going to be talking as we get further on into the show about the, I would say, thoroughly real estate developer pill designs that the Trump administration has on Gaza and also on the wider Middle East and also weirdly Ukraine. Yeah it's a foreign policy day here at Trash Food. We're gonna, much like Donald Trump is trying to, we're just gonna knock it all out in one evening. Just tick all the boxes off at once and

then not have to think about it anymore. The Dnieper riverfront is beautiful for condos. They're going to be great. The views amazing. Like 50% chance. And I'm actually saying this in the next two weeks. You could do in a city on the Dnieper river in like, um, in Donetsk, you could do a city authentic thing and call something like, you know, the old coal mine or whatever, like a tapas bar.

Yeah. Yeah. That would be nice. Gentrify the Dombas. I'm building my own house there. Mara Luhansk. So, we're going to do a little bit of UK stuff before we get into the foreign policy. I've actually briefed Seamus on some of the labor nonsense we'll be talking about.

For example, I have a new version of what do you call a group of three white men, a podcast joke, which is what do you call a group of three or more Labour Right members of the Labour Party's right wing? A WhatsApp group scandal. Yeah, they cannot keep a secret and yet they also all love saying unacceptable things in group chats. It's two qualities, two essential qualities of being on the Labour Right happening at the same time, right? Being personally very unpleasant and also scheming. And so, those two things interact with each other and, you know, the one person who is kicked out of the problematic group chat for not being problematic enough or over some different Labour right beef is just like, we'll see about that because

I've got a million screenshots. Yeah, this is it. Because if you're going to have a WhatsApp group, especially one that has spicy-ish stuff on there, you really have to have the circle of trust like locked down, right? And the problem with like the Labour Right is that they all hate each other. It's a classic thing of like the only thing they hate more than like their sort of perceived enemy is like they hate themselves, but they also hate each other. And so you've just got to assume when you go into all this, they're like, they are all snitching on you in some form. And if they're not stitching on you right now, they will

eventually. Look to your left, look to your right. If you don't see the but like they are all snitching on you in some form. And if they're not stitching on you right now, they will eventually look to your left and look to your right. If you don't see the person who's about to snitch on the group chat into you, they wish they had what Gibbo ricey cheeks and more exactly. Yeah. But before we get to that, I had two, two pieces of quick news up top. Number one. So this is a, this is sort of back over, over the pond in the U S Brett McGurk. Oh, Jesus Christ. Every time.

Has found his post-politics career, which is much like Daniel Penny. He is being rewarded for presiding over death with a position at a venture capital firm. Oh, good. Yes. This is from Lux. So Lux being the investment fund.

Says geopolitical superiority was once measured by military might and economic strength alone. But today technology has become the new currency of global power determined by who leads in AI tech supply chains and so on. That's why we're really excited to welcome Brett McGurk to Lux Capital as our newest venture partner at a moment where maintaining America's innovative edge requires both innovation and sophistication. Few people understand the intersection of technology and operational statecraft better than Brett McGurk. I mean, I think it's really important that a venture capital firm seemingly focused on innovation is hiring someone who famously continued to suggest the same exact thing

to solve the Gaza crisis for years. That being the Saudi Israel normalization, which absolutely everyone else would say is absolute dog shit and would not work. But look, I'm not in the venture capital business. I don't know what they value. Fundamentally, I am a bug person. I don't get it. Suggesting the same thing 50 times. That's the innovative part because it's the last thing they're going to expect you to suggest after the previous 49 times. Exactly. Yeah. During his brief period out of government between 2019 and 2020, should have been longer,

should have been forever, McGurk taught graduate courses on strategy and presidential decision making at Stanford and served on the board of a Lux company called Primer. Teaching presidential decision making when the president whose decision making you've been party to is Joe Biden is like really just Writing on the whiteboard just kind of do whatever you feel like he's not really in the office most days mentally, you know Yeah, it's presidential decision-making is a lot about time management and getting it done before like 330 Don't get bitten by any of his dogs Don't get bitten by him

specifically with McGurk with Biden like one of. Specifically with McGurk, with Biden, one of the reasons why McGurk stuck around was because Biden made the decision that McGurk reminded him of his dead son, and that's why he just stuck around. Was he teaching that? This is not a man, not like any of these state department freaks have really any sort of value

to be a part of the people. But McGurk is one of those people who uniquely has always put forward failed plans. And the only reason he's been rewarded through long periods of service is because of the idiocy of others. It's really a fluke of government that he is around. I mean, Shavis, you were describing the venture capital industry to a T. He's going to fit in perfectly there. I said, look, my fundamental issue, and this is something I've discussed many times before, is that I assume the world functions better than it does.

I assume it rewards different things. This might be one of the only people to go into venture capital and have that be kind of a moral step up. That's less people probably baby. It's harm reduction. This is what harm reduction looks like. Yeah. Yeah. But Brett McGurk was a bad apple. So we took him off the force and put him on paid leave in venture capital. Extremely paid leave. We've given him the state department's strongest sanction.

Yeah. They've nerfed McGurk. Yeah. Oh, God. It's make work for McGurk. So basically, right, the reason they're saying is, well, he was on the board of a company called Primer, which harnesses natural language processing for real time analysis for the defense and intelligence industry in crisis

and operational environments. It was there we saw his... To be clear, what they are doing is like, well, we are going to buy influence with a type of State Department guy who everyone like him has probably been fired at this point and replaced by like a Doge Dean, but never mind. And what I found very funny, I went on to the Primer website. I thought there might

be some interesting stuff there, but it's mostly for reducing AI hallucinations in military situations. But what I thought was very funny is their whole quote. It is, Primer democratizes AI and allows us to scale across a massive organization and put insights directly into people's hands. Our analysts can perform tasks at a data scientist level. That's from Aaron Bernstein, who is the senior director of insights and advocacy. Where do we think? Where do we think he's the senior director for insights and advocacy?

You're never going to guess it. Pallantive? Sounds pallantive. But if it's, but healthcare here's my first guess as well. Like that is not bad. Then maybe Liberty University. I don't know how does this come up? Yeah.

Kink.com. That'd be better. No, Walmart. Why does Walmart need to reduce the hallucinations in military AI? That's- Oh, the friendly fire with Walmart's drone program is in military AI. That's the friendly fire with Wal-Mart's drone program is terrible. Yep, that's right. Walmart needs to use what is, I guess, an intelligence grade AI for something.

We don't know what it is. You thought Britain was getting an easy ride on like keeping its participation in the genocide quiet, but like the Walton family, it seems even quieter. There were Walmart surveillance planes up there, you know? I have questions about Walmart that I didn't have before, like, this was brought up. So here's what I was able to tell about what it is that Walmart is doing with this thing. So they say the command software is designed with a single pane of glass motif in mind. It means you can look on one screen to see the status of your whole operational environment.

They take queries from users, much like a Google search, pull vast amounts of data such as social media feeds and news articles, and populate the results with summaries, context and recognition. It extracts people, places and things of note, handles translations and presents sources that explain the processes like math homework. I think what Walmart has bought is, Walmart is tracking negative sentiments about itself and is essentially employing CIA grade analysis material, uh, with, and it's increasingly becoming more like a company with spies.

The Walmart intelligence division. Yeah, I'm a Walmart pre-cock. They keep me in a bath all day long. It's my job to find out if people are posting about us on the Facebook. I think about it before it happens. That pretty much sorts it out. Essentially. Anyway, so that's what Brett McGurk is being rewarded for his time at the sort of sharp end directing the sort of blood-soaked Imperial Colossus. He's being rewarded with his like multi-million dollar busy box job at a

venture capital firm called Lye. He's floating in a sensory deprivation tank in a saline solution. Scanning the internet for posts about Walmart that are about to happen. So before we move on as well, I wanted to talk about this labor WhatsApp group scandal with Seamus. When I explained it to you, you told me that maybe Britain should just sink into the sea. But I want to be clear. I also think this about the country I'm currently in. So, I'm equal opportunity here. So that's not against you.

Suicide by climate change. Yeah. Labour, as we know, Keir Starmer is being party-aided. All of the embarrassing stuff that's happened in the Labour Party for the last five years, suddenly journalists are finding it. Not just him, everyone. Rachel Reeves is getting it. Like, weirdly, I'm waiting for the West Street thing

hit pieces to really come in, you know? I mean, he's gonna have to do a limited hangout where it's just like West Streeting works too hard and he can be like, oh, the leaks are coming for me. West Streeting trying to pivot the, you know, whatever horrible thing it is into a mortar friendly thing and be like, at least I know from the bone structure that the skeletons in my closet are male.

It'd be so funny if actually it's not going to happen to Wes Streeting because Wes Streeting is actually the black prince. He's like controlling all of this. Like he's the one who's going to come out on top. He's the puppet master. I mean, that's probably not wrong. Oh God. Prime Minister, where's treating? I, I, I, unfortunately, I think that's likely. Oh no. Oh no. Did I have my hand on the lathe when I said that?

No, look, so this is a WhatsApp group set up by Andrew Gwynn for his labor faction slash like employees between 2019 and 2020. The WhatsApp group was called trigger me timbers. That's not even a joke. That's not even a joke. That's just Joker Jason. Yeah, it does sort of sound like a sort of like right wing YouTube channel. Yeah. And so I'm where Francis Foster is the dame.

So we've alluded to this, right? The story has developed enough things worth mentioning at greater length. So now basically, like over a dozen counselors have been suspended from the party. Two MPs have lost the whip. One of the people who've been suspended is Alison Gwynn, the wife of former health minister Andrew Gwynn, because all of these people are married to one another. Oliver Ryan, the MP for Burnley, is also at his whip, the whips were taken away, and so on and so on. And it's like the ongoing party gating, the creation of scandal about a man

utterly without qualities. So all of this of course reflects on Starmer is very weird to see. But of course being the fish rots from the head. So Keir Starmer has to the honorable thing and resign. Of course. Yeah. Any other leader would be 20 points ahead, including grudgingly, West Street. Yeah. I don't want to pearl clutch about what they've said in the group chat, largely because

we knew this entire faction of labor from the last time this happened. It was largely prevented from being a national scandal, which was of course the Ford report. Yeah. It's like hardly news that any of these guys were like very racist about Diane Abbott specifically, you know, because it's all happening in this group. They were still in this group being racist about her specifically. It's like so much old news that it's even the same woman that they're talking about. You know, like I say, these are messages from 2019, 2022. Why are they just emerging now? Everyone is now known about this for years.

It's a great year for filing cabinets as they're finally being allowed to open. Oh, it's a time capsule. Every journalist in the UK operates on a time capsule basis. They get the WhatsApp messages and then they bury them in a little plastic orb in the garden and they write like 2019 in there and they put something from 2019, like maybe a screenshot of the Gibbo group chat, you know? Maybe something fun like that. Maybe like a really, I don't know what else happened in 2019. Nothing really of import. And then they screw that together and they bury it in the back garden. And then they just dig it up at a random time. And then they just put whatever's in there in

the news and it's not connected to anything else that's going on. You know what it is? It's next to the like, I want to archive messages for this long setting in WhatsApp. It's another one that says after this long, I want these messages to be automatically texted to a BBC journalist. And that defaults to off. You have to go in and change it. But for some reason, this seems to have gone to like, you know, five years time. Oh, sorry. I used to clarify the this seems to have gone to like, you know, five years time.

Oh, sorry. I used to clarify the new iOS that defaults to on. Oh, fuck. You do have to go in and change it or you are going to be texting, uh, Emily Maitland. Journalists have got those, um, like, you know, like automatic mail shot settings on WhatsApp that dealers use. It's like, I've got the pengest WhatsApp messages hit me up active all night long, 7 PM till 6am. Five pale emojis. I just, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Three for a hundred. Maitlet's getting all of my dumbest WhatsApp messages is quite a fun idea. She gets a text at like two in the morning from a group chat I was in that just says this Pepsi strong as fuck. You've got me, I'm in. So we speak about, yeah, again, these's like these group chats that are rife in British politics because most of it's conducted via WhatsApp group chats full of, you know, personally loathsome people who again, we've known are personally loathsome for a long time.

So easy for the Walmart intelligence services to hack. Like there must be like no privacy for any of these people if you're actually looking. Oh that's why they're so easy to honey trap. Like these guys, I'm surprised that more MPs haven't been caught up in like pig butchering scams. Excuse me? Like David Cameron? Well hang on he wasn't butchering. It refers to, it refers to the type of scam where you'll get a message usually from an attractive like Chinese woman or say like I've made a huge amount of money in crypto. Why don't you replicate my trading strategy? Just deposit it here. And then like, you'll get returns for like six months and then you'll be, Hey,

why don't you make some real money, put in $40,000 and you'll get like a million. That happens, right? Yeah, exactly. Then you do that. It happens. Good, good. I don't have to do anything. Yeah. I'm surprised more MPs haven't been caught up do that. It happens. Okay, good. Good. I don't have to do anything. I'm surprised more MPs haven't been caught up in that kind of thing. I bet they have. And it's like, it's going to be released that, you know, like fucking Oliver Doudon has been caught up in a big butchering scheme. So they are talking to one another like they always talk to one another, which is like, I hate my constituents and wish they would die.

My favorite part of this, and this is, I think, goes to the thing you say, Riley, about what British politics always comes down to, is Andrew Gwynne texting about, like, a voter who was giving him a hard time about bins, specifically, and texting, dear resident, fuck your bins. It's all bins. This is the bin country. That's all we care about. That's what he's going to go down for. That's the most offensive thing you can say in this country. Fuck your bins.

Excuse me, sir. So Gwyn originally reposted a tweet in the group about Angela Rayner buying Apple AirPods, which read, I don't see what the problem is. It's impossible to give a blowjob while wearing wired headphones. Anyone with a similar background to Angela would understand this. I love the party of working people. It's just like a bizarre kind of misogynistic fantasy there. I don't even know what they're riffing on there.

Is the suggestion that Angela Rayner gives out blowjobs because she's from a working class background? Yes, that literally is the suggestion. It just seems like a leap to me. All morality aside, that just seems like, what are their positions? All working class people, where they work is sucking dicks. Like that's what they, that's what they think the red wall is. It's just like, oh, another day down, blow job factory.

Yeah. Well they heard the deck sucking factory. That shut up closed down rimming factory. That was the worst job. There were no dignity in that. But the blow job factory, it's all right, you know, you go down, they provide the mouthwash, it's all right. You know, you go down, they provide the mouthwash. It's okay. You can give a blowjob with wired headphones on, believe in yourself, mate. Give it a go. I know that there's the insult inherent to suggesting that a woman would just

give blowjobs all day, but also, yeah, like, is that like a hang up? Is there like a hang up that you have? That like, it would be impossible. Is this something that you have thought about? It's that these guys are the most like, kind of psychosexually weird people in the entire country somehow. The group also suggested that they tried to sabotage the launch event for Rebecca Long Bailey's campaign

against Keir Starmer for leadership of the party. They bragged about booking tickets under spoof names and shared photos of the event saying it was empty. One member of the group said you could only do three Macs at a time so I had to make up loads of random emails. Another's added that they booked two seats with disabled access. Gwynn replied lol and jokingly suggested fake names for the disabled people such as Ivor Biggin. These are the same people who will say with this straight face will accuse you of student politics. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And the very funny thing is several months later in April 2020, when Stammer became leader and the report into anti-Semitism under Corbyn's leadership exposed secretive messages between officials, ala the Ford Report, one of the group's members wrote in this WhatsApp group, I would be decapitated if my WhatsApp was leaked. Well, mate. Wait, wait. What has he been saying about Mohammed bin Salman? No. No one will ever bone saw me. I write on WhatsApp confidently.

That's the thing. Keir Starmer is now officially, he's officially embarrassing. He's officially being deemed as basically unable to run the country. So all of the people who party gate you when you are unable to fix British politics, but all you have to do it with is like a tenor and like a teaspoon. You have failed to reimagine the British state without really changing anything and confronting anyone really in power. You have failed. You are now going to be party gated. Everything that you have done or people associated with you have done that can be made to seem a little bit sort of off or make you seem like you don't have a grip on leadership will

now be done. And the next person is going to be put into the big wicker man that we keep at Downing Street who will then be given the task of reform the British state without like changing anything or confronting anyone in power or reducing the influence of the Treasury, for example. And if you fail, you will also be party gated in the Wicker Man. To be fair to Keir Starmer, it's absolutely impossible to give a blowjob while being set alight to bring about a good harvest.

Yeah. I have a question that I think I know the answer to, but I'd still like to put it out if I can. What it seems like, I'm just very confused by the fact that, okay, I understand the Labour Party has to go through this constant tearing down of its leadership, believing that maybe there'll be one guy who does Blairism correctly. But also it seems like the Conservative Party is stuck in that same sort of cycle at this point.

That's correct. With Badanach. It's the one person who can do Thatcherism correctly. But also, but both of them are afflicted by memberships that don't seem to supply any sort of inspiring leader in any sort of ideological sense. And I'm just, I know that they don't have a plan, but like someone has to have a plan to fix this. Yeah. Right? Well, did Brett McGurk have a plan?

No. Well, I guess he had one plan. Yeah, he had one plan, but I'm just, I, it gets to the point where like, I know that I myself am ideologically opposed to you as a labor person or as a conservative person. I get, I feel bad almost that you can't like, you can't figure your way out of this in any sort of way. And then it leaves an opening for someone like Nigel Farage, who has total control over the people that he leads and he's doing great it seems like. Yeah. I mean he's fucking, I saw the poll randomly, I saw the poll that said like he was in the lead in front of Labour conservatives. That seems incredible.

I'm just- Yeah, well it's because he is the only, like we talked about this before, I think like you see evidence of it every single time a major thing happens in British politics, which is you the drive ever since Thatcher has been or since Blair, sorry, has been you must transform the state because after Blair was the financial after Blair and Brown financial crisis, the state clearly needed to be transformed. And the first plan was austerity and that sort of didn't work and everyone agreed that I mean, it works for the people who it worked for, right? It accomplished that goal, but it didn't transform the state to make people like... Buy people into the whole project of Britain again in the same way that Thatcherism and Blairism both did for their respective

constituencies. And so no one was able to reform the British state because we're still stuck in the last reform. And so, the next guy who's got the official plan to reform the British state that isn't just, I'm going to keep doing what everyone's been doing since 2008, but I'm going to get it right because of my personal seriousness and my unwillingness to compromise and all this stuff, right? I'm going to find the tweak that like makes the last sort of 15 to 20 years work is Nigel Farage. He's the one who's turn it is on the Xbox to reform the British state. Yeah. Well, he's going to finally address the fact that all of Sheffield's blowjob

factories have given out all of their jobs to Eastern European workers. That's right. And I think the ongoing party gating of Keir Starmer is just that process continuing and whether it's going to be one of the other thousand group chats of labor right, like high ranking members of the labor right being genuinely awful to one another and their constituents, whether it's just getting more of that or God knows what kind of scandals that have been like just sat on until it's time that it's like, it's no longer Starmer's turn on the Xbox. I think it's also probably worth noting and I'll be very quick with this, but like with Faraj, Faraj is such a big character and also like the structure of reform is one where

it's like very difficult to depose him or like difficult to like sort of issue a leadership challenge to him. That's like more the way that like the pilot, like his party is structured. But because he's such a big character, I feel like everyone who's sort of involved in reform kind of knows what they're in it for. And also like their sort of reformation of the British state is very much one of just like hitting the accelerator and sort of, you know, again, it's like, it's just like stripping parts of like the state, but at a much faster rate. But with like the Labour Party, even though that tendency is still very much there, because like the people who are left in the Labour Party are all like fucking careerist dweebs who all like want

to sort of have these leadership roles or these like big roles in the party. I feel like the party, I feel like that party is a lot more susceptible to like in-fighting. And by in-fighting, I mean just like snitching, right? It's like sort of uniquely exposed to that level of snitching because that's what you did when you were at the National Union of Students, right? Like that's what happened during the National Union, like in the sort of like period of the early 2000s and 2010s if anyone was like even kind of microscopically involved in like any type of student union politics. That's the best way to understand it. With the reform guys, they don't really want to do that. Or

at least it doesn't appear that they want to play the game. They're very aware of what's going to happen. They're very aware of what their limitations are. But they're also very aware of what they can and can't do. One more thing before we move on of labor, game playing and failure to reform the British state is that if that as just an example, I think of what you're talking about is Yvette Cooper has decided at the home office to start her own department of government efficiency looking at the home office.

A second shadow doge, a shadow shadow doge. But no, there's four because like I read somewhere that like the Telegraph have like sort of set up their little like little Doge unit inside the newspaper. They've got two people whose job it is to just be like, oh, this little charity receives £150 a year and therefore it must be obliterated. The Spectator has its own version of that. You've obviously got the Brew Dog, Brew Doge.

There's a Substack person who also has set one up. So there's at least five or six versions of Shadow Doge. There's like a sub stack person who also like has set one up. So there's like, so there's at least like five or six versions of shadow doge alongside Riley's version of shadow doge. If the listener can't like the listener can't see what I'm doing, but my eyes are rolling back so far. My optic nerves are about to sever. Oh my God. By the way, all of this is creating justifications for guess what? More austerity at a time where defense spending is projected to jump so much that departments are looking at 11% spending cuts.

I don't think you guys need nukes. I'm going to be real. I'm not sure if we can be trusted with them. No, this is not a serious country. You do not need Trident. It's not. That's a different thing. That's how we're going to make up the budget deficit is you can rent out like a day for like a stag do. You can rent Trident for a day. Like you used to be, you can do that with super cars. You should be able to just like do donuts in the North Sea. We're going to fire Dave out of the torpedo tube. That'd be a right laugh. They let you write your own letter to the people before you do a nuclear apocalypse.

We've dressed him up as Kim Jong-un and we're firing him out of the torpedo ship. Okay, that's just a great way for the British state to raise revenue if the other thing is like, yeah, I guess we're going to have to cut the Department for Local Government by 11%. Government spending saving stag-doos, stag-doos. There you go. There we are. This is innovation. Hire it all out to stag do's.

Yeah. I hate when I'm serving on board like a Trident missile submarine and there's a hen dude that comes through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's difficult though, because sometimes your stag dude gets assigned a worst government department and you're just like, everyone's showing up at 9am with 14 tins at the job center. The Defra stag do.

Horrible. We've got the stag dressed up as a P45. Yeah, the thing is, it's like everyone knows that the only way to get the foreign office is like you have to spend so much money to get to have the foreign office rented out for your stag do. And it's really fun. You get diplomatic immunity for a day. It's awesome.

Yeah. But you've got to go abroad. We've got the diff Mac at MUKE. Now we're going to the British embassy in Prague. We're going to get on it. It's cocked to a policeman. That's that. Yeah. You can buy diplomatic immunity from the foreign office so that you can go to

Prague for your stag do, and then like do cocaine off of a policeman's service weapon and then they have to be okay with it. Meanwhile, the deference stag do a stuck culling a million birds because of a H5N1. When you said there were going to be loads of birds on this stag, this was not what I had in mind. No, so Yvette Cooper wants to start her own stag dose. Yvette Cooper,

wife of Ed Balls, who again is like on Good Morning Britain, right? Like all these people are all married to each other. And so, I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing.

And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing. And so built Neon, which was, you know, which that's why it's so uncanny. Again, Yvette Cooper is looking at Doge and rather than seeing like, oh yeah, no, this is the thin end of the wedge of the total restructuring of the American state. We've, we're starting a department for government, of government efficiency that's going to do away with away days. Civil servants are going to have to bring in their own pens. It's like doing Trump a bit of a sort of an ego favor if he can be bothered to pay attention, which he won't.

And also just straightforwardly taking Elon Musk's 19 year olds at their word, that that's what they're there to do. Right. As opposed to root out any kind of, to try and like find and destroy the cathedral. No one's going to the Cotswolds on her watch. The trouble is for it to really be like an aesthetic mirror image of Doge, the person who'd have to be in charge would be like someone who makes bad cars and is also an absolute freak. Like it would have to be like if somehow Bevo resurrected British Leyland, he would have to be in charge of the British government's Doge project.

The guy who's in charge of British Leyland has hired a bunch of children to try and like go into the British government and make it more hostile to migrants and trans people. It's like fucking hell. What blood is there left to like extract from that stone, you know? You can't even get a bus to work and he's focusing on that. Stay in your lane, mate. It's like it's at that point.

How can you cut to the bone when what you're looking at is a skeleton with a little bit of gristle left on? How on earth is there a Department of Government Efficiency? What are they, what are they doing? Are they going to make civil servants bring in their own like pens like, like fucking teachers are now made to? All civil servants are going to be replaced by stag dos. I think that's the only plan we have left for stag do's.

That is legitimately another, that's like the second great idea in as many episodes that's been brought up on this podcast that involves the word doge. And a very nerdy, a very nerdy stag doge playing shadow doge. The Supreme Court replaced by a stag do. The bant of Supreme Court. You have been found to be an absolute legend. It's a mixed verdict because they have adjudicated me to be a proper legend, but also an absolute cunt. We're doing restorative justice. See that away.

All rise for the hardest geezer. We are bearing witness to the ongoing slow, I would say, another phase of the ongoing slow decline of Britain that America shockingly appears to have outpaced us on. Yet again, Britain coming second. It's because of the American work ethic, you know, they just do more hours in a day. That's right. I want to move on and I want to talk about what appears to be the coming or is it actually the coming resolution of at least this phase of hostilities between Israel and Hamas? This is being brokered largely by the change of government in the States.

And as we've alluded to at the very beginning, this is Donald Trump's view appears to be a fully real estate-pilled vision of the US taking over and administering the Gaza Strip, and then handing it to a bunch of like, you know, like mobbed up casino developers to turn it into the Middle East Riviera. Seamus, is that sort of a good summary of what's happening? That's a good summary of what's happening, mostly insofar as there is no like, there's a step one, and then there's a step three, and then there is no step two in like how you would even achieve that. Everybody seems to hate step one as well. That's the thing.

Step one is awful, step three is awful, step two presumably would also be awful. But like I hate to hone in on like the logistics of a terrifying, brutal and morally objectionable thing. But the logistics of it, I think, are important in that there are no logistics of it. If Israel, through more than a year, I mean 15 months of the most intense bombing of any territory, I would argue, any ever in my history,

dealing out thousands upon thousands of soldiers, making entire towns into death zones, if that alone cannot even expel, if it can't even shake Hamas's rule over Gaza, a place that has been under siege for 20 years before, what is the plan for America to do the same thing? That doesn't make any sense. And also, if you were planning to buy Gaza, as Trump has also suggested,

in tandem with just taking it over. I mean, I'll repeat what Abdel Malik al-Houthi said when he also tried to ask this question, like, who would you buy it from? The people of Gaza? The people who refused to leave? Just kicking a palette of travellers' checks out the back of a C-130 and calling it good. Yeah, like, I also read all the posts for people in good. Yeah, like, no, like I also read like all the like posts for people and guys on Twitter being like, I was planning on leaving in order to like, you know, pursue my education or pursue medical treatment. But after I heard what Trump said, I'm going to stay here in the rubble.

The idea that you would be able to move all of these people and that they would love to go and be ethically cleansed. It's a myth that's been propagated throughout these past 15 months, but it's sort of amplified into even more absurdity by now. It's not in the realm of any sort of reality. So if it is put into action, it's just going to be more terror with no real end point. Because I want to ask, right? Like, this is, there's a fragile ceasefire that is, right? And this is the day after plan that appears to be being floated, as we've talked about,

is this depraved division of like the Las Vegas strip in Gaza, and that it involves, you know, ethnically cleansing Gaza entirely. And I should say, I ate to the rep, but I just want to make it clear to like listeners who have heard this plan before. He's being told this by Jared Kushner and Jared Kushner, his mind is functioning. So he's seeing it from a Zionist perspective in which Gaza would be redeveloped as like an Israeli settler paradise. But Trump hears this, internalizes it, but does not actually process it. So he thinks, oh, redevelopment, that means it'll be like a Riviera, like you're saying. Yeah. He gets like the lobe of Trump's brain that's permanently playing the like 60s Ocean's Eleven with Frank Sinatra in it is just like Vegas, baby.

Specifically, the sentence he said was that the people of the world could live there. Like he doesn't understand how it functions as like a territory, what his borders are, what his structure is. He just sees it as like, this was an area that was bombed in the ether. Therefore I can make it into something else. It's not, it's even less than a plan. It's just then a blank check for an ethnic cleansing. It's, it's, it's less than a plan. What it is, is a just reactive impulse.

It is just, it is, it is just his, it's just habit even as just, Oh, some land has been cleared. The weather there seems to be nice. Everyone's talking about it. Casinos, hotels. It's interesting as well because it's, it's kind about it, casinos, hotels. It's interesting as well because it's kind of like, we've traded one impossibility for another, slightly more vulgar impossibility, it feels like, because the Biden thing was always like, we're gonna get buy-in from the Saudis and from Egypt,

we're gonna have a presumably Muslim-led peacekeeping force in Gaza. That was never gonna fucking happen either. It is as implausible. It's just, it's the same sort of like thing of you have someone who wants something in this case, it's Jared Kushner being like, we're going to turn to more Israel and it's just being laundered through like the brain of a very old, very stupid and very racist man sequentially in this case. Um, and it's, it's come out as something that just cannot

happen. Well, there are also like other terrible plans that the Israelis suggested as well that were unworkable, but would have been more palatable potentially to Biden. I mean, there was one in which they suggested that the UAE would take it over, not just peacekeeping for us, and that the UAE would redevelop Palestine education so they wouldn't hate Israel anymore, which I don't know about you guys, but if I'm sitting in the rubble of my civilization and I hear from the teacher at the school that actually Israel is great, I would be not so keen on believing it. But again, I'm not there. I'm not in that environment.

Well, the UAE could build a museum of the future in Gaza and then people will be like, whoa, that's crazy. I'm just remembering, I prefer nothing, the Tom Clancy peace plan, which he did in one of his books in the nineties, I think, which was to make it a kind of like extra territorial, like international statelet, which was policed by the Vatican Swiss Guard and nobody had any problems with this. Yeah. IDF would be terrified of a guy with a halberd. I feel like.

There's like 20 of those guys. Yeah, it's really putting a lot of onus on the Pope. Yeah, because the Pope's not involved. He's a third religion. The guys who have spent over a year sort of like running out of like tunnels and bunkers to like physically place explosives on tanks, looking at a guy in like sort of like bi-color stripy pantaloons and being like, I don't know about this guy. You know? Yeah. Well, Gaza should then have to have like a big gift shop at the Raffa Crossing. It takes like an hour to walk through like different like Pope, like you know, bits of cross, whatever. In a meeting with the King of Jordan,

Trump said of Gaza Strip, we're going to take it, we're going to hold it, and we're going to cherish it. That was such an unusually gentle third adjective. I really wasn't expecting that. Well, because it's realistic. It's realistic. Essential, you know, like, I don't like essential Trump. That's really one of my favorite genres of guy that he is.

Trump approaching the Middle East like it's a skittish horse, just like patting it on the flank and going like, shh. What he wants to do, what he's envisioning here is, do you remember that time when he like hugged the American flag? Right, yeah. But this is also, this comes to like the other question, which is the whole sort of day after plan. I remember when we first talked about when the Israeli genocide

began, one of the things that emerged very quickly was they had no plan for the day after. They had no plan other than just kill everybody or expel them. And as silly as the Trump plan, as sort of gaudy and unworkable and crazy sounding as the plan is to turn, yeah, the site of some of the worst massacres of the last like, like this century really into hotels, right? As crazy as that is, that is just the implied Israeli day after plan being made explicit. That's all that is. Do you remember the settlers doing the like presentations

where they had like AI renders of of condos on the beach and stuff. Yeah, I mean they had names set out for the new Israeli settlements that were to build, and additions were rebuilding the old ones like Netzerim and things like that. This is what, yeah, what you're saying. This is what Israeli-riving politicians, people who have been in the government, like Dezalel Spoklis, like Evis said until recently, Inamar Ben-Ghivir, they were all saying this, they were making it explicit.

The past, like, several months especially, like after Assad was overthrown, and they went back into Syria, what small veneers still remained over what Israel wanted have really just been, like, shaved off. And now you have Netanyahu, I mean, just recently,

saying in a meeting with Marco Rubio that this plan that Trump was saying, this is a great solution, right? This is a plan to make sure that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel. The removal of that threat means that the people themselves have to be, have to leave. Yeah, what could be less threatening than a casino? Like a maphorix for people's financial stability, perhaps, but that's a risk to be weighed. But my frustration that has been constant and continues to build, but has especially hit like a fever pitch here, is that we had to entertain all of these arguments from liberal

defenders of Israel that this was not like the actual Israeli intention is of course not a thick cleansing. Because why would they do that? You know, this is a liberal pluralistic democracy. They only want to remove a threat. These are the statements of fringe figures. But now of course, it's absolutely not a fringe. Fringe figures like Benjamin Netanyahu. Yeah, they're like, this is like he's the guy and he's not just like,

I know you hate Netanyahu, you think that like Benny Gantz would do something different something but Gantz I'm sure would be on board with this. Lapid I'm sure would be on board with this like this is not a disagreeable opinion to many Israeli politicians. What you talked about about the step two right is like step one ceasefire step two question mark step, Riviera. Step two is, the implied step two is remove the Palestinians from Gaza. And again, Trump, unlike Biden and Coach McGurk, Trump is willing to say, okay, yeah, let's remove them from, let's do ethnic cleansing,

let's remove them from Gaza. So again, at this meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, right, Trump said, I believe we'll have a parcel of land set aside in Egypt for the Palestinians. Did not consult Egypt on this, by the way, which is that's going to be a pattern when we talk about Ukraine as well. Guys, they don't need all those pyramids. We're going to put the Palestinians in one of the pyramids. There's a lot of space.

So Abdullah, being a gigantic pussy, just said, let's wait until the Egyptians present their ideas. And it also was like we have to do what's best for our country and yada yada yada. Like Abdullah and Sisi, they're not going to submit, they have at least enough sense that they're not going to submit to this. They know that accepting two million Gazans into their respective countries is going to destabilize the entire thing for a myriad of very understandable reasons. But they are absolutely going to be willing to humiliate themselves like this. And even if they claim

that they're going to reject this, they're going to continue allowing it to be pushed and forwarded and made more acceptable discourse. And that is an unforgivable sin in my eyes. So Egypt is currently, I would say, at the forefront of a diplomatic blitz to corral support for an alternative, which is basically the Biden plan, where the Palestinians, where Gazans are ruled by a committee of technocrats drawn from across Gaza to administer the enclave and that Palestinians trained by Arab forces like Egypt or the UAE would then provide security. Egyptian officials are now seeking publics and Reuters, public and private funding sources across the region hope to secure,

hold a donor conference to secure commitments. And it's like, well, wait, is Hamas just gone? I mean, are we doing Gaza? Are we doing like Gaza Doge? Removing like needless waste in the Hamas administration. Yeah. No, it's like, it's a fantasy, right? Like even under its own terms, there's something that will not work in heavy air quotes, right? No, I mean, what's the thing that has been missing from all these conversations about

new administrations is that Hamas always said, they said, continue throughout this, that they would accept the reintegration or the re-insurance of the Palestinian Authority into Gaza if there were elections, right? That there is a new election in which the Palestinian people can choose again for the first time since 2006 who they want. And if Hamas isn't elected, then that's fine. But at least that there is a reemergence of the state of Palestine as an actual functioning government with elections.

But that has never been entertained by the Palestinian Authority. They still want Fatah to always be in control of everything. And I assume, you know, I'm going to guess that this current plan where they want the Palestinian Authority to reemerge, they're just going to want Hamas to surrender. And yeah, what I think would happen is if you are like, either you demand that Hamas surrender all of its functions as a state, as a quasi state to this new Palestinian administration.

If they don't, what are you going to go to war with them? Are you going to do another intra-civil war within Gaza for this? You're going to hope that the PA, which famously is unable to do anything without the IDF backing them up, you're going to make a collaborator administration with the IDF, go to work at Samas and then hope that that administration is valid to people, that they're going to accept it. There's no, none of this is, is stable without the idea that there are no Palestinians inside of it, which is why the Israelis know that that is the only like actual solution in their mind.

Because as soon as you allow Palestinians to stay there, they're inevitably as human beings going to have opinions and dignity. And that's, that's not a variable that they want to account for. And ultimately, right. That is something like opinions and dignity are going to get in the way of doing, you know, the Trump hotel and casino in fucking Gaza city. That's just, that's it. That, that, that is it. And that's what, but that's also why I think that, you know, the, um, the UAE is ambassador to the United States. Uh, Yusef Al Otaiba said, I don't see the alternative of what's being proposed.

So if someone has one, we're happy to discuss it, but it hasn't surfaced yet. Literally the, all right, smart guy, let's see you take a crack at it thing with the two piece jigsaw puzzle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because Yusuf al-Ataiba, I just fucking hate his guts so much. He's constant foreign in the side of every Washington insider, constant fucking nuisance.

I hate him. Sorry. And I think what he's saying is, you know, in this case, which is there is short of recognizing that Palestinians are human. There is nothing short of doing the Trump. There's nothing short of replace them all with hotels that, you know, that the international community will really consider. Well, you know, but that's the problem is because all the Palestinians in Gaza, they don't agree with the Trump hotel and resort plan. So we've come up with a compromise solution

where they're not there anymore and then they won't agree with the Trump hotel and resort plan. So we've come up with a compromise solution where they're not there anymore. And then they won't disagree with it. Yeah. Well, they can disagree, but because of the distance, they'll sound quieter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're going, sorry, what? So Trump also repeated. So this is, and we come down to the sort of mafia-ness of this all, right? Which is that Trump keeps repeating these suggestions, right? The US is going to directly administer Gaza under US authority. He doesn't, when asked who are you going to buy it from? He's like, we're not going to buy it. We're just going to go.

Have we considered the possibility that between Canada and Greenland and now this, Trump has just tried to like maximize the number of stars he can get on the flag? Is he playing RAP? He's like, what's going on? Yeah. He says, I can tell you about real estate.

They're going to be in love with it. He said of Gaza's future residents. while also insisting that he personally would not be involved in the development. Oh boy. And then it's this- As long as he's avoiding a conflict of interest. And this is you. He's doing his classic thing where he says something outrageous and then his staff need to semi-walk it back. So now nobody in the region, whether Egypt or Jordan

or even Israel actually knows if the plan is all of these like sort of senile brain farts that Trump has had, where Marco Rubio, whose God knows what kind of conversations he's having. Well, I guess at the time of recording, he's currently talking to Sergey Lavrov. Oh, good. But Rubio and Caroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Trump only wanted Palestinians relocated from Gaza temporarily in an interim period that will allow for debris removal and reconstruction. But also like talking about debris removal, 70% of the buildings

have been damaged or destroyed. 70% of the farmland has been damaged and is made unlivable. That includes about a quarter million units of housing, and it has produced the destruction equivalent to the most devastating urban warfare in modern history. So shame is what you mentioned earlier, right? 50 million tons of debris have been created, and it will take tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Gaza, and that restoring their economic output to pre-war levels will take 350 years. Which in that sense, for Trump to go, yeah, okay, we the US are gonna take care of that,

is, let's say, uncharacteristically magnanimous, which will lead you to another thing that leads you to conclude that he's not gonna fucking do it. But yeah, it's a real adventure in mid-level people having to say, sometimes you have to pretend not to hear Mr. President. I mean, that's the last two have basically been in the same position. Bring back Scaramucci. He's a resist lib now. He does the rest is politics US.

That gave me a stroke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They need to put Rory Stewart on that prison where like Oshelon is like that. It's like the mirror image of Pod save the UK. He's he's there outpost here. It's like a suicide pod. They have to bring them all together. Yeah.

You think of U.S. administrations and being sequentially more nakedly gangsterish for quite a suicide pod. They have to bring them all together. If you think of US administrations as being sequentially more nakedly gangsterish for quite a long time, right? This is just the next stage of that process, right? Where it's like, well, we are going to, we are going to strong arm the building of a bunch of casinos. This time Mo Green will not be involved, right?

That's the main difference between this and the Contra-Chev-Vegas. Trump actually doing this is a funny idea in the sense that if, you know, it would all be done as cheaply and as corruptly as he's done everything else. So the casino lasts six months and then collapses. It was made out of sort of cardboard, just built lazily on top of a bunch of demolished homes. Yeah. And then like the, the, on this sort of continuity, uh, Palestinian resistance that has like managed to like managed to maintain a network in

the country, goes to plant a bomb under the casino and just falls apart by itself. It's like, oh, I guess we didn't need to do this. The first building to fall down from a virtual red triangle landing on it. They shouldn't have got SNC Lavelyn to build any of those resorts. So ultimately, I think what I want to get to with this before we move on, because I want to talk about Ukraine for a little bit as well, because it's the foreign policy episode, is that the Trump plan has to be, in my view, understood as really not a break with any of the Biden plans at all, because it is exactly as much of a fantasy

that relies exclusively on an unrealistic dream of either total compliance of Palestinians or the expulsion of all Palestinians from anywhere close to the Gaza Strip into another country. All of that is just the fantasy that allowed the genocide to continue because they could pretend there was a day after plan. And also I would say that even if, and people have brought up the fact that you know Biden was on board with the idea of lots of gossips leaving, but he just didn't add on to the grotesquerie of saying, yeah, they will build a casino on top of the whole thing. That covered

it up. But also, like, even if you nominally say, even if you just say out loud, like, Jack, we don't, we don't want to see any, we don't want to see any of these guys leave. It was their country. But then you support it. If you give them everything they want, if you give them endless eternal cover for everything they want to do, all the assassinations, what do all the massacres they, they could ever think of, then are you actually opposing that plan? No. Like three, like you're saying're saying, there's total continuity. There's no change, really.

Realistically, there's no change. And you can also look at other sort of foreign policy theaters the US is involved in and also look at more continuity than you might expect. More change in Ukraine, of course, but more continuity than you might expect, right? Where the recent Trump overture to Zelensky has been, okay, smart guy, if you want our like, you know, tanks and bombs and stuff, why don't you just sign over all of Ukraine's

mineral wealth in exchange for a hope that we will continue to send you a large amount of sort of money and resources? You know. This is the deal that's been offered. Yeah. It indulged me while I live out for one second here to say that it's very funny to do that kind of corruption in Ukraine specifically, directly after Hunter Biden. So, Biden's personal corruption in Ukraine being limited to, give my dipshit son a job, and then Trump shows up and is like, yeah, just sign over all the titanium and wheat and whatever the fuck. It's very funny. But

it is kind of the same impulse, right? Of like, I'm gonna solve this so that we can say that it's solved, it's done, you know, Gordian not cut. I was gonna say something like this, I like how much of this is really just like, he's a deals guy and he just like wants to say, I got a deal. I got a deal. And like, so he's just trying to do so many deals, not out of any sense of like, I'm sure his acolytes around him, like probably have a sort of idea of like what they want to do on a sort of like, you know, rail politic level, a sort of, you know, a broader foreign policy level. They want to make their marks in American history. But for him, it's just like, I just want to make deals, man. I love

deals, deals, deals, deals. Donny deals has gone and Donny done another Donny deal. The problem about being a deals guy is eventually you do get outsmarted by a Turkish ice cream man. The Turkish ice cream man is going to be in charge of giving back the Donbass. With what you're saying, with what you're're saying, it's what he wants to do with Iran as well. He's recently talked about he wants to not do war, he wants to do a deal with Iran. That reminds me of the fact that he tore up the original deal. It's what he did with the North Koreans as well, right?

It was just the sort of actual kind of nature of whatever deal he was trying to make, it didn't really change anything, it wasn't really material. He's seemingly forgotten all about it now. But he was able to sort of say that like, oh, I almost made a deal with like North Korea. To which like the question was always just like, number one, who asked you to do it? Right? It was just on the list. It was just on the list for him to do. And this is the thing about Trump, right? Is that he's the closest you can get as an American president to being like unburdened by what's come before, in the sense that, specifically in Ukraine, you can judge

for yourself how idealistic or cynical or self-preserving all of the European support and American support for Ukraine was, but Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of it, and he doesn't even give a fuck about stuff he himself has done or said. Everything is approached completely in isolation. And so it just comes to like phone calls, basically. Have you seen that film, the The Apprentice? The one that like, yeah, and like, I saw the BBC series. That's right. Yeah. That's the British version of it. It's like the British office in the American. Now you want to be the president of the United States, but, um, but like in that film, like

one of the really sort of like interesting and very telling things about like the Trump stuff is that he wants to sort of like do deals. He doesn't really think about, he thinks about like the repercussions afterwards. Right. And so much of like the story is very much like he wants to this hotel, like what becomes a Trump hotel and like people like generally is asking like, why do you want it? What's the purpose of it? This is shit. Why do you want it? And he's not really able to answer. He just wants to do the deal. And you can sort of see it's like, it's a really interesting insight. And obviously so much, obviously like lots of is, is dramatized and everything, but it does kind of like reinforce that point about like, he wants to present himself as being like

a deals guy through and through. But what's seemingly happening is the Jews. That's right. Yeah. And so what he is proposing is, uh, sort of any, this is again, this is not to Ukraine. Crucially. This is one of the other things about this as with, um, uh, as with Jordan, right in Egypt, he's done the thing of just like announcing something without anyone else who might be involved having any notice of it, and just go, I'm going to talk to Putin, Ukraine isn't invited, Europe isn't invited, which has led

to this hilarious scramble for dignity as everybody's meeting in Paris to be like, how can we finagle our way back into these negotiations somehow? It reminds me a lot of how the Afghan conflict was wound down in that Trump famously sent Pompeo to do peace talks with the Taliban and reached a peace deal, but did not include the Afghan government, despite the fact that that was the whole thing that they were there for. And so inevitably they do this peace deal and then when you know, they withdraw during Biden's administration then that's what it all just collapses.

It all dissolves because America has no beef with the Taliban anymore. And it seems like with the Ukraine stuff that it's going towards that sort of situation. President Zelensky may have been excluded from the negotiations with Putin and Trump, but he can talk to me. I'm a great listener. I'd love to hear what's bothering him. That's basically all he can offer, Stammer, is this thing, right? Where Trump pretty much killed the idea of Ukraine ever joining NATO, right? So that's out. So what we have instead is the gold standard that Zelensky will be looking for is US troops in West Ukraine so that if the Russians try and like fuck around again,

there are Americans there. That got ruled out, so now what we're down to is Stammer et al. going, okay, well there's a bunch of European troops there, but they're not there under the auspices of NATO, they're just kind of hanging out, vibing. And then if anybody shoots at them, we don't really know what happens after that. Maybe we're at war with Russia without the US? We'll just kind of vibe it out. And I feel like that's the kind of thing that you can't really vibe out in the moment. What if Russia shoots at that one Dutch special forces guy that's there or the

one Estonian guy Estonia a war with Russia? Well, they've wanted this whole time. I think like what you're looking at is a kind of, you're looking at a transformation in the global system. I mean, like JD Vance sort of outlined as much of this at his Munich speech. I could talk about that speech for an hour, right? Because it is, I think it's one of the most important things of the administration so far. And I think it's a weird, again, weird

mirror image of Putin, right? Because it's all posting and it's like a guy who has been deeply and insanely radicalized and it just going to Europe and being like, you guys are all gay anti free speech Nazis, which is like the same conclusion. Like, and having got that from the group chat that he's in with a bunch of zoomers, right? Oh, I forgot about that! Oh my god! This is so stupid. All of the crispiest memes direct from a Discord server to the Munich Security Conference, where she's like, have you heard about this piece of clickbait?

And every sort of secure crass in that room is like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? Well, in the same way, Putin had very real geopolitical motives that seemed to get entirely elided by seeing Conchita worst on Eurovision and being like, Europe's gay now, you gotta do it because they're gay. And it's just like, there's some serious brain rot occurring in very, very high places, and I think that bodes very well for Britain to kind of like interpose itself in that conflict and be like, well, we could potentially start

a nuclear war here if we do this wrongly. By the way, everyone involved is like dangerously stupid. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Britain is the straightest country on earth and it is just the one to be in the middle here. Make sure nothing gay happens. I honestly, honestly, I do think that like the, what, what you are seeing in some ways is the kind of shedding of you in both cases of the sort of the Ukraine realignment and the Gaza plan and stuff.

What Trump is doing is he is, he is, is not on purpose. He's just doing this because he is unable or unwilling to sort of grasp all of the little of the diplomatic maneuvering. But he is just saying, I'm going to make the implicit explicit. The US is going to negotiate with Russia because of course, Ukraine was a proxy war. Obviously, it was a proxy war. So why don't we just negotiate? Of course, we're going to have to, we're going to have to remove everybody from the Gaza Strip because there was no way that any of these other fantasy plans that everyone had to pretend

was real, was real. And because he's not interested in maintaining the soft power-based US hegemony of the last 50 years, or sorry, the US hegemony that involved soft power at all or consensus of the last 50 years. But by the way, I'm not passing judgment on that. I'm not like, oh, beans. Oh, no, NATO is no longer as much of a going concern, right? More as observing, just observing the change. It's like it's a change that is more unpredictable, which is bad in itself, but that's not to say that NATO is a great thing. No. Yes, exactly. And so we, but what he is doing is,

because the US hegemony is not going to be mediated through institutions and consensus and pretending that like fucking, I don't know, Germany is as important as the US because they're all just countries on the global stage or whatever, because he is, he is about hierarchy and dominance and all of the things that that nice consensus-based institutionalism masks, right? Because he's about all of that. It's just the convenient stories that allowed liberals to get on board with all this stuff have just are gone. You are, you are seeing the, you are seeing the, like the return to the ways of an old colonial empire in which, you know, the British, God love them. They were not concerned about like scholarships for Myanmar back in the day.

They were concerned about how we can assert our dominance through military prowess America. They were not doing those sorts of... They were not doing, you know, soft power programs when they were conquering the Philippines, when they were most powerful. They want to return to that. They'll do that any way they can. And trying to attract immigrant talent

is obviously off the table. Trying to project the idea that America is someplace that is attractive in any way is off the table. Power needs to come from within and it needs to be projected without. And any other priorities are are wastes of money. So now we're just destroying all of our cultural hegemony because we're bored. Yeah, great. I think it's awesome. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's, I think bored is one way of looking at it.

I think that driven in driven insane by being a colonial metropole is another. Oh, either that or everyone involved like had a hamburger while visiting Britain in the nineties. Sorry, everybody. Sorry. Yeah. Oh, fuck. It's the it's the it's you know why it's Gen X people leading Gen Z people. It's lead poisoning leading TikTok.

Yeah. It's explaining BSE to an American. Remember that burger you had at the Hard Rock Cafe in London in 1996? Well. Yeah. Well, guess what? But no, I honestly like that. That's, that's how I see what is happening. It is to be at the head of an empire for that long has driven the empire insane. And it is, it is now like one of those animals in the zoo that goes mad in captivity and just bashes its own head against its enclosure until it dies. Yeah. And also like the frustration of like knowing that you're the prime

superpower, but also being constantly frustrated that you have not had like an honorable moment in a great many decades. Constant, beset by constant failure. It'll drive you crazy. And you know, we're now just beginning to see, I think the real rubber hit the road in that sense now that some of these plans are at least being floated and have to be taken seriously. But I also noticed that we've been going for a while. So once again, just like the American Empire, this podcast must thank Seamus for appearing on it. I always appreciate it. And as ever, if people want to follow

your writing, where can they find it? They can find it at Seamus-Malekfzale.com and I have a couple things coming out very soon in Parapraxis magazine and protean bank. Oh hell yeah. Okay, so do check all that out and Okay Milo want to name some cities. Glasgow sold out. Thank you still on sale Perth Brisbane Sydney Melbourne Canberra buy tickets to all of those. The most in the cities of Australia. Link in the description. Also, I think, that's right. Yeah. I think also Dublin.

Not Adelaide. Fuck Adelaide. And some other Irish dates, I think, Cronsell. Adelaide could not get a venue. Sorry, Adelaide, I'm on a schedule. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, thank you very much again for being a subscriber. Don't forget there's a Patreon. An episode will come out later this week that you can get for five American dollars That's right. Or soon. Maybe like Redmond B or something. Yeah That's right. All right. All right. Well, we'll see you there everybody. Bye Thanks for watching!