The Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump is not entitled to immunity from civil fraud and conspiracy charges brought against him by former employees of his now-defunct business empire, The Trump Foundation. Former President Trump's case now goes to the Supreme Court for review.
00:02:00.640I do not have the view that they took this case because they're going to hand out a win to Donald Trump in the Colorado case,
00:02:07.320but here they're going to essentially give him a defeat by saying there is no presidential immunity in this case.
00:02:14.040Yes, of course, I think ultimately they will not grant immunity in this case,
00:02:18.240but they have given him the win because the D.C. case, let's just face it, is on life support now.
00:02:24.840People in the media, people at home, and people sitting in the White House have to stop pretending that the Supreme Court is some kind of benign trying to do its best institution.
00:02:37.600The cravenness of the court is evident in what they are doing with the pacing here, right?
00:02:42.100Like putting this off for seven weeks, sitting on it for two weeks for no reason,
00:02:46.200obviously pushing all of the cases that they can push,
00:02:49.520pushing them to the point where Trump will be standing for election before any of us have heard the verdicts in any of those cases.
00:02:55.120Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily, live from Washington, D.C.
00:03:01.740Today is February 29th, 2024, Anno Domini.
00:03:05.520You saw the mainstream media there, absolute freakout being held from yesterday when it came down,
00:03:13.680the Supreme Court had what's called granted cert, the issue of this order granting cert,
00:03:18.460saying that they would take up the president's presidential immunity case.
00:03:21.680Now, of course, there was no question that the presidential immunity case in the Jan 6 trial would be brought up before the Supreme Court.
00:03:29.440This is a direct constitutional issue.
00:04:34.080So the same people that we just played for you in that clip that were all losing their minds over me and my CPAC speech last week are now this.
00:04:53.300I was going to destroy democracy in America.
00:04:55.940They didn't actually listen to the rest of my speech, just literally like the first opening words.
00:04:59.140And now they're spending this week losing their minds that the American people are going to be able to vote for a candidate of their choice in an election.
00:05:15.520So it's anti-democracy to be able to vote for a candidate, but it's pro-democracy to use lawfare to knock him off of a ballot.
00:05:27.680Remember, Joy Reid was one of the chief, one of the absolute chief.
00:06:17.800Mike Benz joins us for the full hour after this.
00:06:20.200Ladies and gentlemen, one of the best ways that you can support us here at Human Events and the work that we do is subscribing to us on our Rumble channel.
00:06:38.640And we're putting them out every single day of the week.
00:06:41.520I rolled with bloods and them boys had a saying.
00:06:46.240You can't be listening to all that slappy whack, trim out his outlet, it's a bam ship, nippy bam bam, like Human Events with Jack Posobiec.
00:06:55.860Jack Posobiec back live, Human Events Daily.
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00:07:52.180You talked to any of the lobbying shops down here in D.C. today,
00:07:55.260even, and I, I want to tell our next guest this.
00:07:59.940I'll have to tell them more offline about this, but let's just say that I've got a little birdie from one of the biggest tech firm lobbyists in all of Washington, D.C.
00:08:13.060That tells me these guys right now, the entire town, the entire Beltway, including the tech firms, are terrified, terrified that Donald J. Trump is about to return to office.
00:08:27.720And so everything that you see splayed out before us, whether it's today, whether it's in the New York Times, this incredible CIA bombshell that comes out there,
00:08:37.740we must look at it through the lens of the return of Trump.
00:08:41.500Obviously, Mitch McConnell last night announcing he will be stepping down at the end of the, at the end of the year.
00:08:47.220To help us make sense of all of these things, Mike Benz from the Foundation Freedom Online joins us.
00:08:53.000Mike, I got to tell, I'll have to tell you more offline about that.
00:08:55.660But yes, yes, the tech lobbyists in D.C. right now are all of a sudden starting to make little, put out little feelers,
00:09:04.640say maybe we should talk to some of these conservatives because next year they're going to be in a little bit of a position of power.
00:09:11.100I would love to hear more about that because, you know, there was a very funny moment from the TGIF,
00:09:18.040the Thank God It's Friday, weekly Sunday Google meeting that came out on November 9th, 2016,
00:09:24.960the day after the November 8th election where Trump won.
00:09:37.740You had the entire C-suite up on the stage answering questions and you had Ruth Porat, the CFO,
00:09:43.960making $45 million a year crying on stage and telling everyone to hug the person next to them because Hillary Clinton lost.
00:09:51.340But there was there was really kind of an amazing moment from from that where one of the audience questions from a Google employee is,
00:09:57.520you know, well, how are we going to basically stop the Republicans now?
00:10:01.140Are you what are we what is Google going to do?
00:10:03.780And, you know, the response, I think it was from from from from Sergey Brin on stage.
00:10:09.880Actually, it may have been Larry Page where he said, actually, we're going to double down and actually increase our lobbying efforts in Washington.
00:10:18.300We are going to not we're going to not sort of distance ourselves and be strangers.
00:10:23.160We're actually going to increase our funding and be closer to Washington to make sure that our our interests are represented.
00:10:30.700Google would go on to pour a tremendous amount of money into everything from CPAC into individual legislator coffers.
00:10:36.880And it even came out about a year after that, that there was a deliberate strategy within Google to basically pry apart the Republican Party.
00:10:45.640And by selectively funding those aspects of the Republicans by making themselves look like they are sort of fair and independent minded,
00:10:53.140but essentially picking winners and losers of the factions within Republicanism to put it back in the sort of what is now the Nikki Haley box.
00:11:00.120Well, and I guess that's my my first question for you before we get into the CIA piece, is that, you know, so Mitch McConnell comes out and says that he's done,
00:11:09.980you know, produces this huge weepy send off yesterday and you've got his people, this sort of wing of the party talking about, oh, it was an incredible legacy.
00:11:19.600The judges, which, of course, weren't were not nominated by him.
00:11:22.680They were not anointed by President Trump.
00:11:25.500So I guess my question is, is Nikki Haley the start of something new or the end of something old?
00:11:33.280She's sort of I see her as sort of the middle continuation of of a legacy lineage that has been going on for several generations in this in this country.
00:11:43.260I mean, I look at this from the reference point of what the blob does abroad, because they brought this whole Department of Dirty Tricks playbook on domestic soil.
00:11:53.120And so, you know what, the State Department and the CIA and the Pentagon sort of civil affairs folks will do is they will create political parties abroad or they will build up political opposition.
00:12:05.500If an insurgent political party, the opposition party to a U.S.-backed dictator or presidency is surging, they will selectively bribe or effectively take out and create factionalism within that opposition party until that party has an opposition leader who is down with the program, so to speak.
00:12:31.760That way, the insurgent forces can be contained.
00:12:35.580And that often requires, you know, what a counterinsurgency strategy that.
00:12:40.620But by the way, this is this has been and I'm just going to throw it out there since this this beef has been public for a while now.
00:12:48.620This this has been Robbie Soov and the guys over at Reason for the longest time, not all of them.
00:12:54.680But this has been your sort of corporatist wing directly tied in with the tech companies.
00:13:02.200Oh, we're just against regulation for all businesses.
00:13:05.140And then they turn around and suddenly they're shilling for the biggest corporations and most powerful corporations in America, the tech industry.
00:13:13.600Yeah, I was one of the guys they used to show to, you know, I mean, that's what that's what the job was.
00:13:19.420The State Department of the Economic Bureau is, you know, that that was that was the I was at the desk that, you know, Google would call when they needed favors from from the federal government.
00:13:29.540And, you know, at the same time, the people who voted for that federal government were being sandblasted off the Internet by Google.
00:13:35.580You know, I was looking at that from the perspective of how can you call these U.S. national champions?
00:13:39.920These people are literally suppressing the people who voted for the very government who did this.
00:13:45.020I mean, at least you could argue in the Rockefeller era when the State Department, you know, fought the everything from the banana wars to the Middle East wars on behalf of, you know, Exxon Mobil and Chevron that that they were they were doing it, you know, for cheap gas prices.
00:14:00.900But imagine if, you know, if you voted for the wrong political candidate or you said something heterodox on Twitter, you couldn't pump gas in your car.
00:14:08.780I mean, would it make sense for the State Department, especially if that was the the presidency that that was running that State Department?
00:14:15.420The State Department was still waging foreign wars on behalf of, you know, Shell and Chevron and Exxon.
00:14:21.360If if you were pumped, you know, half the country couldn't pump their gas from those countries, it made no sense.
00:14:26.220I mean, it completely violated the social contract that underpins our Department of Dirty Tricks, that undermines our big government, big tech nexus.
00:14:36.420And so, you know, it's no surprise that this is that this is happening.
00:14:40.960But, you know, Republicans face a very strong challenge here in terms of what their value proposition is.
00:14:46.940You know, I have a purest philosophy when it when it comes to my my principles.
00:14:52.760But in the grand game of politics, the issue is, is, you know, the U.S. empire draws its strength from these very multinational corporations.
00:15:01.240And unless, you know, the Trump administration is effectively willing to play ball to some extent with the Chamber of Commerce, it's very hard to see how voting alone is going to allow them to engage in the kind of power politics
00:15:16.220that will be necessary to fend off the the various forces that will surround them at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, unless they are doing favors for these multinational corporations in the same way that the Biden administration.
00:15:31.960So here's my question. So here's my question. Where did those same people then find purchase?
00:15:37.640If you have Mitch McConnell leaving office, so that faction's, you know, going away in a sense, or at least, you know, on the surface level, Nikki Haley doesn't seem like she's actually getting traction anywhere.
00:15:49.240We're told that the MAGA wing is ascendant. So where do those people go?
00:15:53.500Or, as you say, is this water just trying to find its path right now?
00:15:57.020I think I think it is the latter. You know, water trying to find its path is a very good description, I think.
00:16:03.160But, you know, right now it's hard to clear the fog of war until we see what happens with this Ukraine bill.
00:16:08.920This is really the first serious test in our nation's history of of a, you know, a majority coalition within the House of Representatives that that might tank a mission critical pump of money into the blob to win a highly sensitive, highly fragile, you know, trillion dollars on the line dark arts operation with respect to the Eurasian energy play.
00:16:38.760The fact is, is there really is sort of a five alarm fire from the blob, because if they don't get, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars over the next year, two years in order to, you know, arm Ukraine and arm all the different clandestine service operations spanning all across NATO, then there's, you know, there's basically no negotiating leverage at the table with Russia.
00:17:08.360And you have to remember this. This money is is not just going to fight this war directly in the immediate term.
00:17:14.760I think that I think the play is to essentially stockpile funds to so that when there is a signed standstill with Russia so that Russia stops, you know, taking all the territory that they are going to do what they did with the Minsk Accords.
00:17:30.660And they're there. You know, the State Department of the U.K. Foreign Office will backstab Russia, will get them to stop basically taking territory.
00:17:38.160And then the CIA will take on a much bigger and much more long tooth, you know, high, you know, high fang intensity snake bite attack over the course of years to to run insurgent operations that violate that ceasefire.
00:17:55.240But in a deniable way, I think that's the play. So the reasons they're so focused on the CIA's role right now.
00:18:00.900And we've got a quick break coming up, but that's exactly where I want to take this after afterwards, because we had this huge piece that comes out on Sunday talking about the CIA shadow war that was being waged against Russia using Ukrainian assets and Ukrainian units for a full decade.
00:18:20.440In fact, eight years before the invasion of Ukraine, which we were told all this time was unprovoked.
00:18:27.760Our guest is Mike Benz. You know, I'd say I'll be right back.
00:18:32.160You know, they talk about influencers. These are influencers and they're friends of mine.
00:18:43.760All right, here we are. Jack Posobiec back live human events daily.
00:18:50.600Our guest, Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:18:54.180So, Mike, the last segment we were we'd just gotten up to this this question.
00:18:58.280It's this indelible tie between, you know, the neocon neolib faction of the U.S. government.
00:19:06.000Nikki Haley, of course, is an avatar of this.
00:19:09.540But then the CIA piece comes out with incredible information, just information that you and I and others have said for over a decade now.
00:19:20.060Oliver Stone originally in his great documentary on Ukraine about the Maidan coup and really detailed information about this.
00:19:27.480And we'll just call it what it is, a high level insurgent group, this unit that was founded and funded by the CIA to conduct insurgent operations across the border in Russia,
00:19:39.760which then they, you know, as they claim, they just happened to kind of go rogue and started conducting assassinations and terror attacks.
00:19:48.400And we're also told, by the way, that it was the same unit out of which derives this this individual, Kirillov Budinov,
00:19:56.380who is now the head of all of Ukraine's military intelligence, someone that Zelensky at one point was talking about putting as the head of the entire military.
00:20:04.880Wrap my mind around why The New York Times would suddenly come out and co-sign everything that we've been saying.
00:20:13.560And by the way, everything that Putin just said to Tucker.
00:20:16.280Yeah, well, this is I mean, this is actually such a shocking moment in American journalist history that, you know,
00:20:24.280I know this this piece came out four days ago, but it really deserves like a true dissertation on its implications.
00:20:31.800These are highly, highly, highly, highly classified operations, you know, 12.
00:20:37.860And by the way, those 12, you know, secret CIA military bases were just the ones on the buffer zone border.
00:20:46.800You know, that's that's not just, you know, 12.
00:20:50.940It's my contention that when the dust settles on this, Ukraine, the Ukraine skirmish and the run up to and in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup is going to ultimately be the largest operation in CIA history.
00:21:06.160You know, it was revealed that that the most expensive CIA operation to date in the CIA's history was the Syrian operation under the Obama administration.
00:21:18.780And that that is I think that's going to be blown away in the end by by the Ukraine story for.
00:21:24.760By the way, that Syria operation, Operation Timber Sycamore, you know, it had that in the same way that this created a nationalist group of the Azov battalion, a sort of elite Azov unit that was conducting assassinations.
00:21:38.580There was another group that, you know, accidentally grew out of the Syria operation.
00:21:47.680I don't know if you can recall what it was.
00:21:49.540They were in the news for a minute there, but just just but they're not around anymore because somebody somebody just made them disappear for some reason.
00:21:57.420You know, whatever, whatever happened to them.
00:21:59.740I I think I know what you're talking about.
00:22:02.220But, gee, you know, it's ISIS, folks, by the way, it's ISIS.
00:22:12.280And, you know, the declaration for our national security state is MAGA is the new ISIS now.
00:22:16.920So they've just turned the same techniques and and technology used to contain ISIS on on social media and in terms of the, you know, I mean, against just regular domestic folks.
00:22:29.780This is basically that I've said, though, Mike, what are you suggesting then that it sounds like this New York Times article is a classic example of a limited hangout,
00:22:40.380a limited hangout when an operation becomes so compromised or public knowledge or public interest becomes so obvious around something that what the agency does is just like an onion.
00:22:53.200They peel back one layer, but they don't actually show you what's at the core.
00:23:02.040There are also so many other layers around it.
00:23:05.420I mean, so the limited hangout aspect of it is that the New York Times starts the story the day after the 2014 coup as if the century because, you know, the the chronology they tell is that.
00:23:33.780You know, we're the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the world's premier CIA cutout, gives five billion dollars to the right sector, you know, civil mob under under civil society, you know, labeled funding in the run up to the coup.
00:23:50.200And, you know, the CIA, the CIA's job is to take assets that are capacity built by the State Department and instrumentalize them.
00:23:58.740And, you know, while Victoria Nuland is handing out cookies and water bottles to the group that she's given five billion dollars to, you know, we're supposed to believe that even though the CIA's job is to shepherd that money for the purpose of of its instrumentalization.
00:24:15.200And in this case, that was the rent-to-riot overthrow of the Ukrainian government when Viktor Yanukovych rejected the IMF trade deal in favor of a Russian one.
00:24:23.820You know, it's they start they start the story the day after the coup.
00:24:27.900It's very much how they started the 2022 story, you know, in 2022 without reference to to the 2014 events.
00:24:35.740But in this case, you know, the guts of the New York story say, well, the head of Ukrainian intelligence the day after the coup had a secret meeting with with the head of the station houses of the CIA and the MI6 in the area.
00:24:49.040And, you know, Mr. CIA and Mr. MI6 sit the Ukrainian intel chief sit down and say, hey, you know, nice government you're trying to set up there.
00:24:57.340We're actually going to set it up for you.
00:24:58.900And we're going to basically, you know, run your intelligence operation.
00:25:20.120And, you know, it sort of starts the story there.
00:25:22.780And that sort of poses this as the evolution of these 12 military bases.
00:25:27.420But remember, this was set up because eastern Ukraine broke away from, you know, these these the Luhansk and Donbat and Donetsk regions in Ukraine, as well as Crimea broke away from the the 2014 Kiev coup government and said, hey, we don't respect this this coup.
00:25:48.500And Crimea formally joined Russia through an annexation vote.
00:25:51.600And so the CIA was helping Ukraine, I shouldn't even say helping Ukraine, was forcing the Kiev regime to militarily reconquer the eastern portion of Ukraine, which happens to be where all of the shale reserves are in the region.
00:26:06.760That Chevron and Halliburton and Exxon and Shell all had 10 billion dollar contracts with NAFTA gas for the mining rights to.
00:26:16.920You know, this is this gets to this big hydrocarbon story and the whole plan to build up Ukraine's endogenous natural gas market in order to capture that, make a trillion dollars worth of profit.
00:26:27.860And these 30 term 30 year long term gas deals and kick Gazprom off if they don't control the the soil underneath that, then they don't get any of those trillion dollars.
00:26:38.180And so they needed the Ukrainian military to go back and retake the area, which is what the CIA was doing between 2014 and 2022.
00:26:45.700You know, this was this is what this was set up to is a military operation to try to win back these these basically secession territories after the the because we were not anticipating this this counter coup to the 2014 coup.
00:27:02.840So, you know, there's much deeper layers to this as well.
00:27:06.100So, first of all, The New York Times didn't this is by the way, I'll just I'll throw in on that that.
00:27:12.120And we do have to keep saying this, this color revolution was not done in a vacuum.
00:27:19.700This is right chronologically, as you correctly mentioned, right after Operation Timber Sycamore.
00:27:24.680So these same individuals, John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, originally in the Arab Spring, so many others, they've done it in they've done it in Libya.
00:27:33.200And now the gang and Vicky Newland were moving up to Ukraine.
00:27:36.720And so they thought that they would have the same sort of free hand that they had had in these other areas and this success.
00:27:44.060But it turned out that, well, in the same way that Russia got involved in Syria, that Russia also got involved in Ukraine because Ukraine was it wasn't just in their backyard.
00:27:53.740The way Syria is, this is literally next door.
00:28:00.900We thought we were unstoppable and we could just coup anyone we wanted.
00:28:04.360There'd never be any repercussions and no one would ever stand up for themselves and Russia would never actually backstop it.
00:28:11.020And this was this was a very serious miscalculation that anticipated that our Department of Dirty Tricks could operate this way in perpetuity.
00:28:21.240This and, you know, this this this moment took the foreign policy establishment completely by surprise.
00:28:26.940And when it turned out that their own population didn't support these dirty tricks either in the form of the rise of a populist presidential candidate like Donald Trump, who is running on putting America first in domestic priorities over foreign policy.
00:28:45.600They they basically started to treat domestic politics with the same counterinsurgency toolkit that they would suppress ISIS or that or the Taliban with.
00:28:54.660But, you know, this is again, this New York Times story is not a New York Times story.
00:28:58.440OK, the New York Times cannot sneak onto a secret CIA military base.
00:29:08.060They have to go through multiple layers of security checks.
00:29:10.880They have to be I mean, what it takes to enter a above top secret, you know, secure secured CIA military base in Ukraine as a staff writer for The New York Times is an unbelievable process.
00:29:24.500They don't have their own private CIA to sneak into that.
00:29:29.820This is very important because there's there's a paragraph that I'm going to read here, which basically, you know, breaks open what's really happening here.
00:29:38.400This is about midway through the article.
00:29:39.800Now, these intelligence networks are more important than ever as Russia is on the offense and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines.
00:29:56.660If Republicans in Congress and the military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.
00:30:02.320So understand what this what this paragraph is saying.
00:30:05.260They're saying the CIA came to us and gave us invited us on because they said they conducted more than 200 interviews, many of which were done at this in the physical building of one of these 12 CIA bases.
00:30:18.520They're saying they're more important than ever.
00:30:20.560And if Republicans right now, as Mike, Mike Johnson is is literally having White House Oval Office negotiations with Joe Biden on this bill, they're saying basic.
00:30:32.200They're making the valid claim argument.
00:30:33.620They're saying if Mike Johnson vetoes this bill, then it's going to get CIA people.
00:30:43.120I'll also throw that they're also saying that if you don't go for this bill, then you're making an enemy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:31:28.440It almost feels like a veiled threat, a veiled threat to Mike Johnson, a veiled threat to the senators, a veiled threat to the congressmen that are set like like J.D. Vance, who, by the way,
00:31:38.160has been named by President Zelensky in his increasingly deranged rants, saying that if you do not do this, the CIA will be coming after you.
00:31:48.420I mean, and it's putting its hand directly on the scale of domestic politics, which is like rule numero uno of what the CIA is forbidden from doing.
00:31:59.740The CIA is not allowed to operate on domestic soil.
00:32:03.140It's not allowed to interfere in domestic politics.
00:32:04.960It's not allowed to target U.S. citizens.
00:32:07.240All three of those are massively, massively violated in the CIA disclosing highly, highly classified intelligence to handpick journalists of The New York Times for the express purpose of tilting an in-process legislative bill.
00:32:22.040Look, the CIA is supposed to answer to us.
00:32:29.580We, the people, decide how much money the CIA gets for operations.
00:32:34.120If the CIA can play games with classifying and declassifying intelligence or selectively leaking it to favorable journalists in order to manipulate U.S. public opinion on an in-process government activity, that's what they do abroad.
00:32:48.100That's why they have a plausible deniability doctrine.
00:32:51.100That's why they are the Department of Dirty Tricks, because they are paid to do that to foreign countries, to manipulate their public opinions, to get their public legislatures to pass or kill bills affecting U.S. national interests.
00:33:05.200It's our national interest, not the CIA's.
00:33:09.380You know, the other is, is this was not a general all-open access media invitation to a highly classified military base on the outer banks of Ukraine.
00:34:44.140But then I would always, I would turn around to other people in the IC and say, hey, do you ever think of applying any of that to the United States media,
00:34:51.160to CNN that you guys all have on, or, or increasingly MSNBC that you all have on in the spaces or in the skiffs?
00:34:57.320And they would say, well, no, that's, that's not possible.
00:34:59.940You know, this is, this is American media and it's never, it would never be like that.
00:35:13.580It's everything that we've heard about for an entire century worth of scandals of the CIA and the press.
00:35:20.680But, you know, another aspect of this that I think is important to touch on is the emphasis of the CIA's role here is very interesting because the Pentagon is currently losing this toe to toe overt war of NATO militaries against Russian militaries is working out very badly for the NATO side.
00:35:39.980Territory continues to fall as, you know, Russia has basically totally evaded every, you know, sanctions attempt in the book by just, you know, we thought when we kicked them off of the European energy market, Russia would go bankrupt and there'd be no.
00:35:56.980Very interesting that when, when this happened, I'm sorry about it.
00:36:08.720I think we lost your, your mic there for a second.
00:36:10.580I think it was on our end that, you know, what Russia did was they brought their supply chains back home.
00:36:16.240They started building up their domestic manufacturing and they realized that if you do that, then sanctions won't hurt you.
00:36:21.600I seem to remember someone saying that building up natural or domestic manufacturing capacity was a national security issue.
00:36:29.520I can't remember what his name was, though.
00:36:37.520But, you know, Russia being able to resupply immediately to China instead from the European market has allowed their war machine to continue completely uninterrupted.
00:36:46.540And in that sustained war, where they are right on the edge of the Ukrainian border, as opposed to the U.S., who's a million miles away, or London, or any of the NATO states in Central Europe basically have no militaries at all.
00:37:00.300And so, you know, this is a losing war toe-to-toe.
00:37:03.260So the only way for there to be basically an ultimate quasi-military victory in the end is going to be through duplicity and subterfuge, which means at some point the NATO side is going to have to come to the bargaining table with Russia and do what they did with the Minsk Accords, which was effectively the declaration of a ceasefire.
00:37:25.400And it came out, you know, just basically a year, year and a half ago, that all along the State Department's plan was never to observe those peacefires and to simply work behind the scenes through our intelligence services to wage a clandestine military operation town by town to recapture them.
00:37:44.480And that is, I believe, where the puck is skating.
00:38:29.580Do you really know who did what in what town of Ukraine that's on the front lines, that's on the border in these places like Mariupol?
00:38:37.920I mean, you're looking at an absolute—I think you said purgatory zone the other day about this.
00:38:44.120That's exactly what we're looking at here in Ukraine.
00:38:46.400I've only got you for a couple of minutes left, but I want to totally switch gears because there's something that you and I were involved in that recently got turned—oh, sorry, last point, last point.
00:38:56.320The Gladio example is totally perfect because it wasn't just about the Russians.
00:39:00.500One of the most important aspects of the Gladio operation during the Cold War is that it was about picking the winners and losers in the domestic politics of all of the NATO member states.
00:39:10.140So it wasn't—they used this cover of being sort of, you know, countering Russian influence, but it meant they picked whether the Green Party or whether the Christian Social Democrats were going to win in Germany or in, you know, in Sweden or in Italy or in France.
00:39:27.140These were whole-of-society networks that were built up and essentially puppeteered by our intelligence services and our State Department and Pentagon intermediaries to be able to control the domestic politics of countries.
00:39:42.380It's not—you know, so it was done under this, oh, we need to stop Soviet influence, but if any party rose to power that was against the interests of the blob, they would be obliterated by these stay-behind networks.
00:39:52.620And so the political politics were controlled by the national security state.
00:39:56.980But sorry, what you were going to say.
00:39:58.340So you and I were blamed for this whole Taylor Swift thing.
00:40:03.260President Biden's out talking about it.
00:40:05.600And yet what I noticed is so incredible is the minute the Kansas City shooting happened, the whole story immediately gets turned off.
00:40:17.960The biggest Super Bowl in history, you flip the switch, you turn it off, you say, we're not going to talk about it anymore.
00:40:26.200And to me, that more than anything shows the power of the media, their story selection bias and their ability to simply turn something off with the flick of a switch.
00:40:36.260No, that's true, although I'm very curious to see what happens just two months from now, because in May, Taylor will be starting her European tour.
00:40:47.720And there was a direct plea by the head of the European Union to Taylor Swift.
00:40:53.400You know, she happened to—she thought her tour was over.