In this episode of Firebrand, I sit down with Rahim Kassam, co-host of the National Post Podcast and co-creator of the Bannon's War Room podcast, to discuss the current events unfolding around the world, including the scandal surrounding Boris Johnson's boozy party in Downing Street, and the growing number of calls for him to resign from his position as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Rahim also shares his perspective on the current state of politics in the United States and around the globe, and why it s so important to have a healthy dose of the populist right in the midst of the current political climate. Firebrand is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday morning, wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocketcasts, and Stitcher. Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with what s going on in the culture and politics of the moment. Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded live at WFMU and produced by Riley Braydon Hill and the Vigilante. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Joseph McDade Additional Compositions: Ian Dorsch Cover art by Ian McKellen Art Credit: Jeff Perla Logo by Geoff Tuchman Theme Music: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters, by Haley Shaw - Music: Jeff Kaale - "Space Traveler" - "Outer - "Incompte" & "Outtro: "Let's Talk About Us" by Fountains - "Good Morning America" by Ian McElroy , "Outro: "Solo" by Jeff Perlan, "Feat. - "The Real" by John Singleton (feat. & Jon Foreman, "The Good, the Bad, the Good, The Bad, The Great, The Wrong, The Good, & The Bad & The Other One" -- "The Other" , "The Great, the White House - "Mr. & The Others" by Roberta - "Noah" & , & "The White House -- "A Good Morning, The Right, The Other" -- "Soleil & The Great" -- "Fucking Good, " by , and "The Wrong, the Wrong, "
00:00:03.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:00:10.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party, and he could cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:00:16.000So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:00:20.000If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
00:01:12.000After an outpouring of condemnation for attending what critics allege was a bring-your-own-bottle party at his official residence, 10 Downing Street in May, while the country was under strict COVID rules.
00:01:25.000The Prime Minister says he saw it as a work event, but finally made an apology of sorts.
00:01:31.000Even if it could be said technically to fall within the guidance, there would be millions and millions of people Who simply would not see it that way.
00:01:43.000And to them and to this House, I offer my heartfelt apologies.
00:01:47.000Without actually admitting to wrongdoing and citing a pending investigation, his apology stoking even more anger.
00:01:55.000It's a potentially lethal blow to Johnson and a scandal that's made casualties of top advisers and staff.
00:02:14.000As a consequence of Joe Biden's failed leadership in the world, a rising China, globalist institutions flexing their muscle, pro-lockdown politicians ascendant, the world is on fire right now.
00:02:28.000And I could not have a better guest to discuss those issues than the guy I'm about to introduce.
00:02:34.000You know him as the co-creator, co-host of Bannon's War Room Podcast, the editor-in-chief of the National Pulse, nationalpulse.com, place I go daily to get my news, and also the co-host of the National Post Podcast, Rahim Kassam.
00:02:52.000Rahim, thank you so much for joining me.
00:02:57.000It's been a long time coming, I feel like.
00:02:59.000Well, I really view you as one of the top information operatives on the populist right, and you may resent and reject that characterization.
00:03:08.000But really, globally, you seem to see a lot of these trends as they're unfolding, and with events unfolding as fast as they are today, I can't wait to get your perspective on a number of things.
00:03:17.000But for those who don't know, Rahim was really the guy who was the catchment apparatus for all of the energy that was behind Brexit.
00:03:25.000You know, for many years, there had been a populist movement in Britain, but really no infrastructure to support big election wins like you saw in Brexit.
00:03:34.000And I remember traveling around the country campaigning with Nigel Farage during the last presidential election, and he talked about how you would sit in the pubs in Britain, in London, and you would listen to the discourse and use that as part of the Cauldron to churn out speeches and op-eds and press releases.
00:03:53.000And now as we see, you know, the UK, I think, revert to its establishment mean in Boris Johnson in much the way the United States has reverted to an establishment mean in Joe Biden.
00:04:05.000I wonder what you think about kind of what you see in the politics of the UK at this time.
00:04:11.000What's an amazing question for somebody like me, because I will try and bend anybody's ear off about what's happening in the United Kingdom right now.
00:04:41.000Boris Johnson got a whopping 80-seat majority in the House of Commons.
00:04:46.000It meant that he could basically rule as he wanted to, introduce whatever legislation that he or his wife, which I'll get into in a second, wanted him to.
00:04:57.000And it hasn't worked out very well because as the Conservative Party always does, it kind of reverts to this establishment disconnected with the public type of governing philosophy.
00:05:09.000And now there are all sorts of scandals swirling around 10 Downing Street, which is the executive branch of the British government, not least to do with Boris Johnson's new wife, We don't have a constitutional role for kind of a first lady in the United Kingdom.
00:05:26.000So people are starting to ask questions because this lady, Carrie Simmons, Carrie Johnson, appears to be at the heart of so many decisions that are being made at the heart of the British government.
00:05:36.000A lot of the climate change policy stuff.
00:05:38.000She was very well entrenched with the Clinton initiative, for instance.
00:05:42.000She used to work for one of their offshoots.
00:05:44.000People are starting to ask, well, where exactly is Boris Johnson getting his...
00:05:53.000And there are scandal upon scandal upon scandals which are building in the United Kingdom right now.
00:05:58.000If I were a betting man, I would say that Boris Johnson doesn't look like he could desperately hold on to power for much of this year.
00:06:08.000It does depend if there's a challenger from within the Conservative Party.
00:06:12.000But it looks to be a tumultuous year in British politics in the very same way it looks to be a tumultuous year in US politics.
00:06:19.000Well, is that a country that's just gone, Rahim?
00:06:22.000I mean, one of the questions we have to ask in the United States is, you know, is the motherland kind of a thing of the past?
00:06:28.000Have they allowed so much unchecked immigration?
00:06:31.000Have they allowed a deconstruction of the social fabric kind of emerging out of the, you know, how urban London became and the suburbs of London kind of flipping against those on the right?
00:06:46.000That's a very difficult question to answer, you know, briefly.
00:06:50.000I'm reminded of an article that appeared in The Atlantic magazine just over the past couple of weeks that specifically talked about this.
00:06:57.000And it took to heart the idea that the United Kingdom is a functioning union at all.
00:07:03.000Of course the Scots are always trying to leave.
00:07:05.000Increasingly the English want the Scots to leave.
00:07:07.000You've now got this division in a post-Brexit world Between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, which we know is Great Britain.
00:07:15.000I know there are all these sorts of different names for all these different territories in that really small plot of land, but they all mean something.
00:07:22.000They especially mean something to their native populations.
00:07:25.000And, you know, what the writer in The Atlantic concluded, and I actually couldn't agree more, With this, which is very rare for me in the Atlantic magazine, but it is that there isn't necessarily a belief in Britain, and there isn't a belief in Britain amongst the public, amongst the establishment, amongst the media, because there isn't anything such as Britain.
00:07:46.000Nobody's actually stepped forward and described what Britain is In the 21st century and where it needs to go.
00:07:53.000There is no long-term strategic thinking.
00:07:56.000And as I sit here in the United States and look sort of wistfully back at a Britain I remembered growing up as a child and don't really recognize that in modern Britain anymore, I see the same things going on in the United States today.
00:08:11.000Very, very little in terms of long-term strategic imperatives that emanate from the institutions that we're told are supposed to do that and you could take the pandemic as an example you know the NIH the NIAID for all these decades have told us that billions upon billions of your dollars your American taxpayer dollars have been funneled into pandemic preparedness but then when the pandemic actually came along there was no preparedness to be had well the same thing occurs in foreign policy
00:08:42.000you funnel billions upon billions as a nation into foreign policy its apparatus the institutions all of that some wonderful buildings In Washington, D.C. But not any wonderful thinking that's coming out of them.
00:08:55.000And for Britain, this is as big of a problem, if not a bigger problem, than the United States.
00:09:00.000I will always say, to quote Vera Lynn, they'll always be in England.
00:09:04.000What that England looks like, I'm not sure anybody has actually managed to put the sentences together that really describe it.
00:09:15.000And when we think about how history is going to judge the Boris Johnson era, you have to look at the government incompetence as well as the embrace of this very globalist pro-lockdown regime.
00:09:28.000And we've seen that embrace, you know, in other parts of Western Europe.
00:09:32.000I know you talk to a lot of the folks who serve in representative government throughout Western Europe.
00:09:38.000What are you hearing about the reconstituting of the populist movement, the extent to which these new issues about healthcare freedom inform on political activism?
00:09:49.000Is this a time when populism, you think, is ascendant broadly there, or are we going to see more of the Boris Johnson-flavored surrender to whatever is churning out of these globalist institutions that, like you say, have really failed the people of the world, certainly over the last several years?
00:10:08.000Well, you use a very interesting, and this is a word I use a lot too, institutions, right?
00:10:15.000And in as much as we can complain about the corruption of the institutions as we've known them, in as much as we can point to the failures of the institutions as we've known them, I'm afraid the political right hasn't particularly done a good job of creating new institutions and it certainly hasn't done a good job of reforming old institutions.
00:10:37.000One of the things that I said when Trump first took office back in 2016 was there is this entity called the National Endowment for Democracy Which gets its money from Congress, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and the president of the organization is appointed by the president of the United States.
00:10:54.000And there should have been a move initially in those first couple of months to use every single piece of power at the president's fingertips to change the apparatus.
00:11:06.000You change the apparatus by changing the leadership.
00:11:08.000If you can't change the leadership and change the apparatus, you have to start again.
00:11:14.000Now, the populist, you know, cause around the world is only growing, I think, in steam.
00:11:20.000You're seeing people who I would have never thought that I would stand shoulder to shoulder with, who are coming out as, you know, on our side on a whole range of different issues.
00:11:30.000I think of people like Russell Brand for instance.
00:11:33.000I mean I watched Russell Brand many years ago when he was in debate with Nigel Farage on the BBC one night and he was on the opposite side of the debate and we were in the green room and he was having his chest hair back combed by one of his staff assistants, you know, to zhuzh up his chest hair so he could go on this television program and be this Lothario and get all these people to like him.
00:11:54.000And I just thought, oh my goodness, what an absolutely awful individual.
00:11:58.000I don't want anything to do with this person.
00:12:00.000And as time has progressed, you start to see people come around to a more populist way of thinking.
00:12:08.000I mean, hasn't Rogan really gone through a red-pilled evolution even over the last several months?
00:12:14.000A lot of the old feminist thinkers now are starting to realise as they come under fire for being TERFs and whatever the latest trend is of calling them.
00:12:25.000What do you do once you get a group of people together who aren't necessarily strictly ideological bedfellows but who find common cause in things?
00:12:34.000Well, you're supposed to start institutions so that you can have these discussions, hash these ideas out and come up with policy proposals on the back of it.
00:12:43.000I'm afraid that barring some good conferences and things like that, the political right is actually pretty bad about setting those things up.
00:12:50.000We have some fusty old think tanks here in Washington DC that churn out a white paper or two every so often, but you don't actually have the philosophical intellectual undergirding that you need to assist the populist movement into that next step, and that's what's missing in this equation to me.
00:13:08.000And yet, despite that infrastructure, we do see successes.
00:13:13.000And you were one of the early people to see that coming in the United States for Donald Trump.
00:13:20.000And I think that you saw a lot of the conditions that you were able to harness and really give an infrastructure to in Brexit starting to gel around the Trump candidacy.
00:13:31.000Is there anything that you can see regarding this political realignment in Western Europe that forecasts anything or teaches us anything about the way the balance of power might shift in the United States in the midterms or still too early to tell?
00:13:46.000Well, it comes back to your question about Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party.
00:13:50.000You know, I sat behind, there are pictures, much to my chagrin, of me standing behind David Cameron when he launched the Conservative Party's election campaign back in 2010 with Big Ben in the background and the River Thames and the House of Parliament in the background.
00:14:07.000It felt like a real sea change moment after 13 years of failed Socialist Labour Party lack of leadership.
00:14:31.000But there was nothing that came out of that government that was particularly revolutionary.
00:14:35.000There was nothing that came out of that government that was particularly conservative in terms of policy proposals.
00:14:40.000And so when I look at the midterms and I see everybody You know, across the United States saying, rah rah, cis boom, we're going to red wave, it's going to be fantastic.
00:14:48.000I say, but what would be the point if you then have a leader McConnell, a leader McCarthy, and a GOP chairman, Ronna McDaniel?
00:14:58.000It would be the same thing as watching David Cameron and Nick Clegg walking into 10 Downing Street and running the country as Liberal Democrats.
00:15:06.000So what the right must do in this country before the midterms Is make sure that they have people in power, in situ, in positions that can either oust those people or hold them to account for the bad decisions that we know they are going to take once they get control.
00:15:23.000Well, and some of it in the minority is just such obvious theater, right?
00:15:27.000Like, I remember when Paul Ryan put the bill on Obama's desk like 60 times to force him to veto to repeal Obamacare, and then when we actually had the power, well, He took all that money from all those healthcare lobbyists and all those healthcare institutions, and then lo and behold, it looked more like an embrace of Obamacare than a repeal of Obamacare.
00:15:50.000We ended up being vulnerable where John McCain was able to scuttle the legislation.
00:15:54.000And, you know, I look at Leader McCarthy's recent statements where he's saying, well, I'm going to throw Democrats off of committees.
00:16:01.000And I have to ask myself, Raheem, you won't even throw off Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
00:16:07.000Like these two people are engaged in an active insurrection against the Republican conference through their membership in the January 6th committee that has just gone totally off the rails constitutionally and otherwise.
00:16:19.000And it's just hard to believe that McCarthy is going to remove Democrats from committees when he won't even remove Kinzinger and Cheney.
00:16:25.000And they openly are at war with the Republican conference.
00:16:29.000I mean, is there something you think I'm missing?
00:16:32.000Well, the good news is if they do end up behaving like we said they were going to behave, we can claim to have been right all along.
00:16:38.000If they don't end up behaving like we said they were going to behave, we can claim that we shifted them in our direction.
00:16:46.000I mean, we're going to be doing some reporting.
00:16:48.000In the next, I hope, two weeks to a month, that shows just where a lot of the hard-earned dollars from ordinary Americans, when they sign those checks to the RNC, where that money's been going and who it ends up with in the long run.
00:17:03.000And I've been going through some of the data on this.
00:17:10.000Law firms, advocacy groups, all of these sorts of things that you absolutely must get control of before you can trust a party apparatus again.
00:17:19.000I struggle to think of anybody now in the Republican movement that I talk to at all who trusts the apparatus.
00:17:26.000And you simply cannot go into a situation where you have a majority...
00:17:30.000In the house, but you don't trust the apparatus at the top of that.
00:17:33.000So this will be our focus for the next several months at least.
00:17:37.000The NationalPulse.com is where folks can check out Rahim's reporting, also co-host of the National Pulse podcast.
00:17:44.000And of course, one of the co-creators and co-hosts of Bannon's War Room.
00:17:49.000Rahim, you were one of the people during the Ukraine impeachment.
00:17:54.000To really understand that Ukraine wasn't just a country that had been randomly selected.
00:17:59.000No one sat around and threw a dart at Ukraine and said, well that will be the basis to set up Donald Trump.
00:18:05.000That actually Ukraine is really viewed as A critical player in the overall NATO expansion strategy.
00:18:14.000And when you seek NATO expansion and you're deeply corrupt, as the Biden family is, the ability to plow cash into Ukraine is something that can benefit the elites to a greater extent even than plowing money into other European countries.
00:18:32.000Now, as you see, you know, the relationship between the United States and Ukraine under Joe Biden, what's your perspective on that?
00:18:40.000And then obviously we're going to get to this standoff at the border with Russia.
00:18:45.000Yeah, I mean, Ukraine is, the whole situation is so wildly out of control now, and it's been going that way for some time.
00:18:56.000I was there during the Medan Revolution in Kiev in late 2014, I believe it was, and saw firsthand what we were being told in the West was this spontaneous uprising of ordinary people who was just trying to throw and saw firsthand what we were being told in the West was this spontaneous uprising of ordinary people who was just trying to
00:19:21.000And I got on the ground and I sort of started to get to grips with the different factions and whose interests were playing into all of this.
00:19:28.000And it was really this one moment where I was in the middle of that square looking at the stage, very nice audiovisual setup, lots of money clearly been pumped into that moment for the world to see.
00:19:39.000You know, these color revolutions that one of your regular phenomenal guests, Darren Beatty, is always talking about.
00:19:47.000Saw that playing out in front of my eyes and it was a moment where there was an EU-sponsored tent.
00:19:54.000It was almost like you were at a fair, right?
00:19:56.000And there was a tent and you could go up to this tent and pick up an EU flag and stand in the crowd and wave this EU flag and it got me thinking, you know, what is this expression of this like...
00:20:06.000What is this supranationalism that's going on here in Ukraine and why is that taking place?
00:20:11.000And I started to do some digging on this.
00:20:13.000I actually came to the issue totally, you know, bereft of any loyalty to any side.
00:20:18.000I just wanted to see what was taking place, honestly, on my doorstep.
00:20:22.000Three and a half hours flight away from London Heathrow Airport or whatever it was.
00:20:26.000This was an extraordinary time to see something take place in real time.
00:20:32.000And the more we dug into it, the more we started to realize that actually what was going on on Russia's border, i.e.
00:20:38.000Ukraine, was this continuation of the idea that Russia was going to somehow try to militarily overwhelm Europe and NATO. Now, you can make of that what you will, and I know Barack Obama had his thoughts on this when debating with Mitt Romney, talking about the 1980s wanting their foreign policy back.
00:21:01.000But whatever you believe about whether or not Russia poses a threat to Europe, the way to not go about forcing the West into an active war is to actually position troops...
00:21:13.000Right upon that border and actually say to Russia, hey, we're closing you in here.
00:21:18.000There's an old expression, I think some attribute it to Machiavelli, whatever, that says, always give your enemy an ability to retreat.
00:21:29.000Because if you don't allow your enemy the ability to retreat, then you're going to force them into a standoff with you.
00:21:35.000And that standoff is what we're seeing take place right now.
00:21:39.000Luckily, I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that Vladimir Putin does actually want to get into a prolonged war on that border and doesn't want to force NATO to actually solve a lot of its internal problems with mobilizing troops in Europe.
00:21:56.000For instance, I'll give you an example.
00:21:57.000I was talking to a pretty high-level source who's involved in a lot of the NATO wargaming recently, and he told me that the Russians could effectively march to Madrid before each separate parliament across Europe would Give the okay to their troops to run under the NATO commanders to actually fight back if the Russians tried to invade in Ukraine.
00:22:19.000And it's kind of a jarring thing to hear this, to say, okay, so a lot of what we're seeing is posturing, but a lot of what we're seeing on the other side is posturing as well.
00:22:28.000Then how do we actually tamp that down?
00:22:30.000We tamp it down by coming to the table and saying, well, here are the problems that Russia has, here are the problems that the United States has.
00:22:36.000And that's what's happening right now.
00:22:38.000I mean, it doesn't please me at all to say this, but where the United States stands today, after the conversation that was had between...
00:22:47.000The Russians and the Americans on Monday morning is actually probably one of the first, albeit tiny, wins that Joe Biden has had in a foreign policy sense for a long time.
00:22:58.000And that could be attributable to what's happening in Kazakhstan as well, or it could just simply be attributable to the fact that Vladimir Putin was after one thing and one thing only during this whole fracas over the last couple of months, this war of words that we've seen taking place in the media, which is to say, you guys are going to have to recognize which is to say, you guys are going to have to recognize that we will not accept Ukraine as a
00:23:20.000And it does seem to me that the Americans and NATO are starting to accept that if Ukraine is subsumed into that NATO power structure, then they are going to have a hot war with Russia, which they are not prepared for, as I just said.
00:23:33.000And it seems that Putin does have outs if he's able to obtain those concessions on the expansion of NATO. And, you know, there are basic questions sort of about the viability of the Ukrainian government.
00:23:47.000And we always seem to see, like, the war hawks I think what I see right now,
00:24:14.000Rahim, is that there are three principal vectors of global power competition.
00:24:20.000Russia, which offers regime preservation.
00:24:24.000I mean, like, if you're a regime and you're about to topple, Russia's probably the best friend to have in the world right now.
00:24:32.000In Kazakhstan, you saw somebody who really came into political power, not as some stooge of Russia, leap into the arms of Vladimir Putin.
00:24:42.000I mean, one of the first phone calls that Tajib Erdogan got during that coup in Turkey was from Putin saying, we're here to help you.
00:24:49.000So regime preservation is kind of the Russia model.
00:24:52.000Then you go to the China model, which no one has covered better than the National Pulse.
00:24:58.000A lot of you are reporting getting into the way that China basically just buys people off in big tech, in government, and uses that bribery system, that cash system to really fuel the one belt, one road strategy.
00:25:15.000And then the United States value prop is we're the best friend to have in the world if you owe people money.
00:25:20.000Like if you are a debtor nation and you owe money to globalist institutions, we could kind of keep the banker off your back that long.
00:25:27.000And I'm just kind of wondering, as you see these flashpoints around the world, How that is going and particularly through the lens of the terrific reporting at the National Pulse that's covered the Chinese Communist Party's malign influence campaign that seems to be pretty darn persuasive without a whole lot of hot lead flying.
00:25:47.000Right, and that is one of the most terrifying things is that there is a power in the world now that is able to quite, I wouldn't say easily, but at least they have a lot of people who are amenable to how much the Chinese Communist Party is willing to throw its weight around.
00:26:09.000A lot of this comes from the fact that, I mean, I want to bring it back to the institution point.
00:26:16.000I don't think America has a very serious long-term strategic foreign policy anymore.
00:26:24.000I'm actually of the belief that it hasn't really had that for most of America's history.
00:26:30.000There were some periods of time where you didn't really want to interact with the rest of the world.
00:26:35.000We are very cognizant of the fact that...
00:26:37.000In fairness, you would barely give us credit for the Revolutionary War.
00:26:45.000But I just, you know, the idea that there is a consensus view about where America stands in the world amongst its own foreign policy institutions is completely incorrect.
00:26:59.000The idea that there is any kind of cohesive foreign policy from administration to administration, by the way, this is not limited to Democrats.
00:27:08.000You don't think that the neocons in the foreign policy establishment Kind of create an American narrative over time.
00:27:13.000I mean, I think it's only recently that we've started to deconstruct that under Trump.
00:27:16.000But I mean, if you look at the Obama doctrine and the Bush doctrine and the Clinton doctrine, I mean, they're not all that dissimilar.
00:27:23.000The establishment seems to be able to sort of weave itself into one American policy.
00:27:30.000I would give the fact that the right has given up on foreign policy.
00:27:35.000And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that America is probably the predominant nation in the world where I find it difficult to get international news because you're...
00:27:47.000Populous and your news media are kind of not really in the weeds on it like other places are.
00:27:54.000I mean, three out of four of every front page newspaper that you see in the United Kingdom on a weekly basis, the front page story will be about something that's happening elsewhere in the world.
00:28:06.000You don't really get that in the United States.
00:28:11.000But that would bring me back to the point that I'm trying to make about the idea that the institutions don't really have this sort of common thread.
00:28:20.000Now, the right has, I think, as a result of this lack of interest, I mean, nobody really votes for a government in the United States based on their foreign policy.
00:28:29.000And I think the right has given too much up in that regard.
00:28:32.000And so what you had is you had the neoconservatives who were Democrats, who were leftists, who were a lot of former communists, who have been allowed to kind of run the institutions in terms of foreign policy for several decades.
00:28:49.000And as we know, there are a lot of now right-wing institutions that take the neoconservative interventionist line on so many things.
00:28:55.000But there has to be an America first foreign policy.
00:28:58.000It can't just be we don't care about what's going on overseas.
00:29:02.000It can certainly be that it ranks far lower.
00:29:05.000But when you come to issues like this, when you come to issues...
00:29:09.000I think Trump did a wonderful job with NATO, by the way.
00:29:12.000You know, reading them the riot act and telling them to pull their socks up We're good to go.
00:29:35.000The LGBT flag or the transgender flag from an embassy somewhere around the world is somehow making a point.
00:29:42.000And the only point it makes to most of those countries is that America is an unserious nation on the world stage.
00:29:48.000This is what I mean when I say there has to be a renewed interest in what America's role in the world is amongst the America First movement, and that can only come by forcing these Democrats out of these institutions and taking a role in foreign policy again.
00:30:02.000Well, and ensuring that the Republican Party doesn't just become the controlled opposition on a lot of these questions.
00:30:09.000I tell you what, I do see optimism in this new batch of people that are running for Congress.
00:30:15.000You would have never seen, even two cycles ago, people talking about a focused foreign policy rather than, you know, invade everywhere, invite everyone, right?
00:30:25.000And now you're starting to see that in more and more of the candidacies that I think are compelling to voters.
00:30:34.000And it's certainly my hope that the foreign policy that the Republican Party embraces looks a lot less like Dick Cheney and more like Donald Trump.
00:30:43.000I think that will ultimately be viewed better by history.
00:30:45.000I think that is the way to Preserve and utilize American greatness to its fullest extent, not to squander it for people that frankly are undeserving of our best.
00:30:56.000And, you know, these issues are kitchen table issues in Northwest Florida, because it's my neighbors that actually go fight these wars.
00:31:02.000It's, you know, the schools in my district that are without the room mom when somebody has to deploy and when they have to do it eight, 10, 11 times, you know, in circumstances that I think have been dubious as a consequence of poor leadership, not diminished patriotism on a in circumstances that I think have been dubious as a consequence of poor leadership, not I think that the Biden regime is going to be judged by a lot of their decisions as they unfold.
00:31:28.000And if they squander American greatness, I think that the American people will not take kindly to that.
00:31:34.000Rahim, I want to ask you one last question.
00:31:37.000And it really has to do with China because at the National Pulse, we see every major China You have covered the fusion of our technology companies and China, our government leaders in China better than really any site that exists right now.
00:31:54.000What worries you most about China's strategy and really the lack of resistance that our country has put up to it?
00:32:01.000What honestly worries me most is that for some reason it comes down to myself and Natalie Winters to pick up on these stories.
00:32:11.000That is genuinely the thing I don't get about all of this.
00:32:15.000We barely scratch the surface of so much of what's going on.
00:32:20.000We can pick up on a trend here or a funding stream there or a staff are moving from this place to the other or whatever it is.
00:32:28.000But it terrifies me that there isn't the journalistic interest in what China is doing.
00:32:34.000I mean, the amount of land China is buying through either individuals or through businesses across the United States is absolutely stagnant.
00:32:45.000But you know why there isn't a journalistic interest.
00:33:00.000But, I mean, if America has anything going for it, That the rest of the world doesn't is that everybody now gets to have an outlet, right?
00:33:07.000And everybody is allowed to, you know, almost freely, and thanks to places like Getter now, a little bit more freely in the social media space, can investigate these things and get these things.
00:33:18.000I mean, look, Natalie came to me as a, you know, somebody still in college who just cared about the future of her country and wanted to investigate this stuff.
00:33:26.000I came to this issue as somebody who recognized how foreign money and foreign interest had already poisoned the well of so much of Europe and my country, the United Kingdom.
00:33:34.000And so I wanted to make sure that America knew what was happening here too and tried to stop it.
00:33:39.000And so my message would be to people out there, there is no special source that we have at the National Pulse that allows us...
00:33:45.000A unique level of intrigue and interest into this subject area.
00:33:49.000We just do the hard work of the research and going to the source documents and finding out all of this stuff.
00:33:54.000And I implore more people to do that because this is going to come down to good old-fashioned work.
00:34:00.000What I think is a very American thing of rolling up your sleeves and getting into the muck of it yourself.
00:34:05.000This is how we ended up effectively, I wouldn't say defeating Marxism because I think it's right here on these shores now, but at least deferring for a generation the perils that were attempted to be foist on us by foreign powers.