STRATEGY SESSION: Global Empire or American Republic w⧸ Darren Beattie
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
153.30005
Summary
In this episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by the Council on Foreign Relations' Peter Bergen and Darren B. Brown of Revolver News to discuss the difference between empire and republic, and why it matters.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I want to take a second to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief.
00:00:06.760
It'll be one email that's sent to you every day.
00:00:08.660
You can stop the endless scrolling, trying to find out what's going on in your world.
00:00:11.720
We will have this delivered directly to you totally for free.
00:00:30.000
This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
00:00:40.600
A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
00:00:47.280
This is Human Events with your host, Jack Poso.
00:00:51.880
Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective, a new world order can emerge.
00:01:00.080
We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order.
00:01:09.680
Now, you are the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, all right?
00:01:13.780
You guys toy with countries of the world like, well, like toys, don't you?
00:01:24.760
What's so interesting now, though, is who's on the chessboard.
00:01:26.980
The toys, if you will, are a lot more than states.
00:01:29.100
I am a firm believer, and it's not a popular position to take.
00:01:34.520
Everybody thinks we've been there 17 years, we need to get out kind of thing.
00:01:40.340
I think we have to be present in that part of the world.
00:01:45.600
I believe the process of globalization is here to stay.
00:01:49.900
A new world order, a new set of challenges is confronting us, both domestically and abroad.
00:01:57.860
The historic role in trying to make sure that there is, after all, a new world order.
00:02:03.960
And the phenomenal opportunities before us to create a real new world order.
00:02:08.780
This criminal government cartel doesn't recognize borders, but believes in global governance and rule by corporations.
00:02:18.420
We will never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy.
00:02:30.420
We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.
00:02:39.860
Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty, not just from global governments,
00:02:49.620
but also from other new forms of coercion and domination.
00:02:54.000
Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived.
00:03:05.440
Strategy session, global empire or American republic.
00:03:11.020
You hear President Trump in that missive, which he delivered all the way back in 2016 in April,
00:03:18.740
that idea about a fight between nation states or globalism.
00:03:24.120
And in many ways, in an economic sense, in a security sense, in a demographic sense, and a social sense,
00:03:32.000
that is what the America First movement is all about.
00:03:36.120
We are joined today for this strategy session, the full hour, by Darren B. of Revolver News.
00:03:45.840
Great to be with you, and a belated happy birthday.
00:03:48.700
My understanding is you had a birthday recently, so very happy birthday.
00:03:53.920
I appreciate that, and love the guitar there in the background.
00:03:59.220
So the next, I've got my fretless bass acoustic, which is off the side here,
00:04:08.080
I've encouraged Elon to do, through X, a Tiny Desk.
00:04:18.240
Like, that's actually, that could be something huge.
00:04:21.340
NPR, it's like, the one thing that NPR does well.
00:04:27.480
Everything has to be defunded at NPR, except for Tiny Desk.
00:04:30.940
The Tiny Desk concert is the only thing allowed.
00:04:33.440
We will allow this, but we'll have a strict, strict controls over who's allowed to perform.
00:04:39.340
Darren, two minutes before the break, or really just one and a half,
00:04:57.180
Well, again, this, I'm glad we have a full hour, because there's so many different aspects to it.
00:05:05.360
You know, we have to clarify what these terms mean.
00:05:08.780
I think, you know, I think we can all agree that in practice, in reality, ever since maybe the Spanish-American War,
00:05:18.220
certainly after World War II, America has been what I think most people would call an empire.
00:05:33.700
I coined this phrase, globalist American empire, which absolutely was meant to have poor connotations.
00:05:41.220
But I think maybe the question, at least on my mind, is not whether we can sort of retreat from the world
00:05:49.400
to the extent that we're some kind of, you know, republic in the sense of, you know,
00:05:55.760
when people think of republican traditions, they think of like Geneva or, you know, Sparta,
00:06:00.760
or these kinds of, you know, city, state models.
00:06:25.720
These are influencers, and they're friends of mine, Jack Posobiec.
00:06:39.660
Human Events Daily, the global strategy session, Empire or Republic.
00:06:44.760
We're on with the professor, Darren Beattie himself.
00:06:49.680
Let's define some of these terms that we're talking about.
00:06:53.740
Of course, President Trump refers to it as a nation state.
00:06:57.680
And I think this is useful for us in a sense as well, because when typically a lot of people
00:07:03.460
will talk about, and you hear this on, you know, kind of the right, the conservative side
00:07:07.360
a lot, they say, well, you know, we're a republic.
00:07:12.280
But, you know, it also kind of rings hollow a little bit in the sense that when you turn
00:07:17.280
on the TV and you listen to the folks in government, some of whom, many of whom are on the republican
00:07:23.160
side even, it seems like the interests and the things animating them bear little relation
00:07:33.900
And so when I say republic, one of the things that I really mean is the a republic in the
00:07:40.620
sense that we should be a nation state beholden to the people of that nation state.
00:07:45.420
And that's all versus the global empire, which or the global American empire, globalist American
00:07:52.900
empire, which is probably a more apt term for the government under which we currently live.
00:07:58.840
So let's give that definition of each up front.
00:08:01.160
Yes, I mean, etymologically speaking, my understanding is that republic and democracy basically mean
00:08:13.620
They just have very different connotations because democracy is obviously Greek.
00:08:26.440
And through a variety of factors, through history, they've acquired different connotations.
00:08:31.160
I think in the context of American kind of politically charged discourse, I know a lot of people
00:08:39.440
We're a republic, meaning to invoke more of the imagery of the founding fathers notion of
00:08:47.220
a constitutional republic, maybe some checks on the tyranny of the majority or mob rule or
00:08:54.560
some of the negative connotations associated with the term democracy.
00:09:00.840
And similarly with empire, empire, I think, for the most part, has a negative connotation.
00:09:13.040
Most people will think of the Roman empire as the model for the imperial typology or maybe
00:09:22.200
And so obviously there are some critical differences.
00:09:27.160
But in the sense of is America always going to be a country with kind of global commitments,
00:09:35.820
of global reach, global power, global entanglements to some degree even?
00:09:43.700
I think that is simply baked into the cake of what we are.
00:09:49.140
And I think some would argue with some justification, say that this is always part of the destiny
00:09:54.460
of America as a kind of commercial republic, kind of a combination of a commercial republic
00:10:02.800
with this pioneer spirit or manifest destiny spirit.
00:10:07.440
Those two things together seem to lead to a more kind of global presence.
00:10:12.120
I guess my one sort of contrarian position on that is I think that exists in contradistinction
00:10:18.140
to other political entities that are often, again, as a pejorative, said, oh, they want
00:10:28.840
I don't, for instance, think that's particularly the case with China.
00:10:32.840
I think there are very severe competitive domain with China and the area of the economy and
00:10:39.420
so forth, but there isn't that kind of natural expansionist tendency that you've seen in the
00:10:49.560
And there's not this kind of ideology, universal, an ideology of universal appeal that attaches
00:10:57.760
Chinese, and you know this very well because you've been there, you speak the language,
00:11:01.120
you understand the culture, are in many ways an ethnocentric people.
00:11:05.820
But by extension, almost, there's an almost insularity that goes with that.
00:11:19.400
Well, and by the way, in fact, in the Mandarin, just to throw in, is that Zhongguo, which they
00:11:26.900
refer to China as, literally means the central kingdom.
00:11:32.620
They don't have a separate word, you know, getting into etymologies, you know, res publica
00:11:38.780
It just means the public thing, the thing of the people, which is the Latin, very similar
00:11:49.540
So you're right, you know, we make these distinctions, but really etymologically speaking,
00:11:54.820
Whereas in China, the etymology is, we are the central kingdom.
00:11:58.860
And when you look, of course, in Asian history, they certainly were the central kingdom of Asia.
00:12:04.360
And it also speaks to their mentality that they want China to be number one.
00:12:09.280
They want it to be number one, but I don't think there's an inherently expansionist sense
00:12:17.000
to the Chinese presence in the world in the way that there is to the Anglo-American style.
00:12:25.200
Think simply of the fact of the English language.
00:12:28.380
You know, I've put out a major piece a while ago at revolver.news that was also kind of contrarian
00:12:35.160
with respect to a lot of things people might see on, for instance, zero hedge or something like that,
00:12:41.120
basically saying that the U.S. dollar is king and the U.S. dollar's status as reserve currency,
00:12:48.820
global reserve currency, is much more secure than I think a lot of people might think.
00:12:57.180
But what's still more secure than the reserve currency status is the lingua franca status
00:13:06.940
So there are so many things that are kind of global, that are in many ways attached,
00:13:14.440
some uniquely and some not, to America and just the nature of the American presence in the world,
00:13:21.280
that I think there is something that is genuinely imperial about it.
00:13:27.500
So I think it's important, I guess, to divorce the negative kind of political connotations of words
00:13:35.340
to what might actually be a more objectively accurate referent to these words,
00:13:41.720
because in a politically charged conversation, empire just means a bad thing.
00:13:51.280
And democracy can vary depending on, you know, who is saying it.
00:13:56.660
It's almost become a word ravaged by the regime commissars who have used democracy
00:14:03.460
in the most cynical context in order to say it's democracy when we screw over the American people
00:14:10.220
and anything that's an attack on their illegitimate authority is in their presentation attack on democracy.
00:14:17.220
But what I'm getting at here is to what I think the central question is.
00:14:20.780
By the way, by the way, can I add to that real quick that the word empire,
00:14:26.040
you can find instances, I believe, where Teddy Roosevelt would use the word empire to expand the American empire.
00:14:34.060
And he certainly was a huge part of this, where he didn't necessarily view that term,
00:14:42.480
certainly didn't view the term negatively, and also viewed it as something that was absolutely within the remit of America's manifest destiny
00:14:52.740
and certainly didn't believe, obviously, his adventures in Cuba are quite well known.
00:14:58.060
But he was in the Spanish-American War that you just mentioned.
00:15:01.040
But he was someone who believed that manifest destiny didn't necessarily end at the borders, at the contiguous borders.
00:15:10.340
And to wit, at that time of the year, of the turn of the century, the turn of the previous century,
00:15:19.580
At one point, I always tell this to people, and they can never believe me,
00:15:24.120
that on the North American continent, when the Declaration of Independence was written, think of it,
00:15:30.840
you had the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French Empire, and yes, even the Russian Empire
00:15:39.300
were all on the North American continent at that point.
00:15:45.740
So no, the founding fathers and even all the way through Teddy Roosevelt
00:15:49.600
didn't necessarily think that an empire was a bad thing.
00:15:56.800
And so I think, again, in the politically charged context, empire just means something bad.
00:16:06.820
But I think really driving at the substance of what's relevant when we say, well, will America
00:16:14.180
be an empire or a nation state or this or that, is really, will America be the kind of empire
00:16:24.840
that, will the victories of the empire be the victories of the American people?
00:16:31.160
I think that was a critical line in Trump's first inaugural, which I still think is by far
00:16:37.560
the best speech that he ever delivered, his first inaugural address.
00:16:42.560
And there was a line there, something to the effect of their victories.
00:16:47.520
And by saying there, he's speaking to the entire audience, which consisted of all the people
00:16:58.720
So I think the critical question is, can the victories of the American empire once again
00:17:06.740
also become the victories of the American people?
00:17:11.020
Can the hegemony of the empire become more in alignment with the thriving and flourishing
00:17:18.640
of the American people with a good standard of living and all the things that you would
00:17:23.900
That alignment, I think, is the critical question.
00:17:26.680
And what we should mean when we say America first.
00:17:32.420
It's the, and by the way, a true empire would obviously exist for the benefit of the citizens
00:17:43.320
And unfortunately, in the globalist American empire, it does not.
00:17:49.420
And so I'm glad that we talked about the definitions, because moving forward, we're going to talk
00:17:58.060
Human Events Daily, the Global Strategy Session.
00:18:04.460
When I'm working long hours, I'm always listening to Human Events with Jack Posobiec.
00:18:11.580
Human Events Daily, the Global Strategy Session.
00:18:14.220
Globalist American empire or American republic.
00:18:17.820
So when we look at the world and we look at America's role in the world and we ask ourselves
00:18:24.020
sometimes, you know, why do we have troops in Syria?
00:18:27.840
Why are we sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine?
00:18:32.320
Why is it that the United States Navy is so aggressively patrolling in waters that are tens of thousands
00:18:43.320
of miles away from our coastline in places like the South China Sea and the Japanese
00:18:50.200
Senkakus and the Diaoyu Islands and all of the different island chains around the Pacific?
00:18:55.140
And we ask ourselves, of what direct benefit is this to the people of the nation?
00:19:02.760
And certainly trade is something that is of benefit to the nation.
00:19:06.720
But some of these other issues seem to be quite a bit far.
00:19:10.200
And so, Darren, I suppose the question that I have here is, in the globalist American empire,
00:19:16.020
it's simply because the interests of the empire are disconnected from the interests of the people.
00:19:22.940
And as President Trump said right there, and we need to understand, and I think that I've
00:19:27.760
learned and we've all learned, that the government under which we live, for the most part, you
00:19:33.240
know, I'm talking about the government prior to President Trump's return to office, his
00:19:38.600
triumphant return, that the interests represented in Washington, D.C. are the interests of that
00:19:45.440
empire, by and large, rather than, quote unquote, any individual representation of their own,
00:19:57.280
I'd like to further elaborate on what I meant before the break when I emphasized this critical
00:20:03.400
point of their victories are not our victories, because this really is, I think, the central
00:20:08.840
metric by which we can judge the normative success of the empire from sort of America
00:20:20.120
Now, again, this is something that is connected to my piece on the U.S. dollar as reserve currency.
00:20:28.360
And I thought, you know, it's far more stable than people imagine.
00:20:30.900
And I think there's this intuitive tendency where people would go online, they would scroll
00:20:37.220
X, they would go to, you know, YouTube or wherever, TikTok now, and they would see these infamous
00:20:45.320
clips of people just drugged out on the street in Philadelphia or people crapping on the street
00:20:55.680
And just see the state of degradation of our once great cities in the United States.
00:21:02.240
And they'd say, my God, you know, the America is really going down the tube any day now.
00:21:09.120
You know, Chinese are going to take over everything or, you know, you name it, maybe Russians, but not so much
00:21:17.300
But they're saying, America is just going down the toilet completely.
00:21:23.060
And I sympathize with that sentiment and intuition.
00:21:27.020
But I think it's important to point out that the criteria and the factors relevant to securing
00:21:37.820
basically American hegemony globally, geopolitically and economically, they're far more divorced
00:21:46.200
from the most observable and relevant metrics of standard of living that we see right in front
00:21:55.660
People think that those are more directly connected that they are, such that when they see the filth
00:22:03.180
and degradation in San Francisco or Philadelphia or name your city, they conclude things, you
00:22:09.640
know, America can't hold on as the number one superpower anymore.
00:22:13.440
When in fact, the things that are responsible for America being the superpower in terms of, you
00:22:20.580
know, energy dominance, you know, Wall Street dominance, military industrial complex, you
00:22:26.980
know, US dollar supremacy, these factors are much farther removed from those standard of
00:22:35.060
And so I think what's critical, again, is bringing those two things into better alignment.
00:22:40.900
And by extension, a lot of our conversations about geopolitics now, I think, are informed by this
00:22:49.460
sense of, you know, exposing the cynicism behind various geopolitical maneuvers, for instance,
00:22:57.700
saying, oh, look, the issue in Syria, Obama wanted regime change in Syria.
00:23:03.140
It was about a pipeline or Russia's doing this.
00:23:09.540
And that accounts for, you know, the energy politics is behind a big part of their color
00:23:14.500
revolution, a big part of that Atlanticist faction of the national security state that
00:23:24.660
But I would reframe it and to say, if only you could break down all of our foreign policy
00:23:39.220
For one, people saying, oh, this foreign policy decision is just to benefit some sector of the
00:23:46.500
Again, if only, you know, kind of related to what Trump was saying about Iraq.
00:23:51.300
It's like we did the whole thing in Iraq and we didn't even get the oil.
00:23:55.060
It's like the cynical interpretation that the cynical interpretation actually be
00:24:00.660
superior to what actually is driving and motivating force to a lot of our geopolitical
00:24:07.300
It would be better to go into Iraq with the purpose of at least getting the oil and
00:24:13.380
enhancing our energy dominance than going into Iraq, you know, based on some,
00:24:17.940
you know, idealistic fantasy of spreading democracy, for instance.
00:24:22.020
So the cynical kind of material explanation would be preferable to the more sort of ideologically
00:24:31.220
But then the second step is we need to make sure that if something's benefiting the energy
00:24:37.140
sector, for instance, that translates into an actual benefit for the American people.
00:24:44.580
And where we are now is in a stage where, yes, there's the cynical, oh, we're doing it
00:24:50.820
for our own material benefit for these companies and whatnot.
00:24:54.020
But there's a lot of the delusion mixed in with this that we need to totally eradicate.
00:24:59.220
A lot of the delusion, for instance, in our dealings with Africa of having, you know,
00:25:04.340
these human rights kind of, you know, but by that we mean sort of left wing
00:25:09.620
ideological agenda attached to our dealings in a way that's not the case for China.
00:25:18.020
We need to get rid of the ideology that has been responsible for our worst geopolitical blunders,
00:25:26.260
But then once we get, once we make sure that our foreign policy decisions are actually made
00:25:31.940
to the benefit of the American economy, American dominance, American power, we need to make sure
00:25:37.380
that those things are actually correlated with the wellbeing and economic wellbeing of the American
00:25:45.220
And that it's not just the stock of the energy companies going up and they get to buy another
00:25:51.860
mansion somewhere, but actually does redound to the benefit of what we more observably
00:25:57.780
see as standard of living conditions for Americans.
00:26:00.660
So I know that was a big mouthful, but I think that's really kind of the bird's eye
00:26:05.940
conceptual framework with which we need to evaluate foreign policy and geopolitics.
00:26:12.580
Look, I mean, people will sit there and say, say to me all the time and, and, you know,
00:26:16.820
certainly as, as I came up sort of through the China circles, you know, you get the China hawks
00:26:22.580
who say, oh, well, we have to go to war with them to teach those chi comms a lesson.
00:26:29.540
You, you'd blow up the entire planet and you just slaughter millions of Americans in the process
00:26:36.420
And then you get kind of the doves and, you know, and, oh, China's this, China's that,
00:26:40.980
but, you know, or, and we should work with them on climate change or, or some such thing.
00:26:44.980
But, you know, when it really, when it really does come down to it, and, and I'm just going
00:26:50.660
to say it, what, one thing I learned while living in China for two years was that Xi Jinping
00:26:56.580
and the government of the Chinese people really does work in a sense, in a sense, I'm not talking
00:27:03.780
about the Uyghurs and I'm not talking about a variety of issues within China, but they,
00:27:09.940
they have actually built up the basic, uh, the basic standard of living for their people.
00:27:18.660
No crime, hugely crime that goes on when you look at a city.
00:27:22.820
And by the way, they did so with foreign direct investment from the West.
00:27:26.980
And I've, you know, obviously spent years talking about this, and that's the reason Shanghai looks
00:27:31.300
the way that it does since the 1990s, when it was, you know, rice paddies on the other side
00:27:35.380
of the Pudong river and is now, you know, one of the financial capitals of the world in, um,
00:27:43.540
And the, you know, you know, the idea that, you know, they're doing that and they're advancing
00:27:50.980
And yeah, it's, you know, in many ways they step over human rights and they'll, you know,
00:27:55.940
tear up ancient, uh, villages and ancient towns.
00:27:59.300
And if you're in the way of the progress, you know, they just move you out.
00:28:01.780
There's no, there's no eminent domain in a, in their system.
00:28:04.580
They just, they just remove you and remove entire towns and entire cities, by the way,
00:28:08.900
were completely flooded when they, uh, when they built the, uh, the three gorges dam and, uh,
00:28:14.340
made this giant, the largest reservoir on earth behind it.
00:28:17.220
And it's like, so what, you know, we're, we're progressing the country.
00:28:20.100
Of course, if anyone knows, uh, what, one of the things probably,
00:28:22.980
I think that most people know about China is their, uh, their penchant for these mega projects
00:28:30.420
And so the, the idea being though, is that most Chinese people, the average Chinese person,
00:28:36.020
not talking about the, you know, the dissidents, but the average Chinese person that you meet
00:28:41.060
when they say, yeah, I support the CCP and I support the government.
00:28:43.940
It's because that person has seen their standard of living go up in their lifetime.
00:28:48.820
And because they've given the, and they're not communist in the economic sense anymore.
00:28:52.900
It's because they want to show their people and have given their people say this pathway
00:28:58.420
to say, if you get to one of these cities and it's hyper competitive and hyper capitalistic,
00:29:02.580
if you get to one of these cities and if you can make it up through the system,
00:29:09.300
And that obviously flies in the face of everything Chairman Mao taught and they sort of use the
00:29:14.180
communist, uh, pageantry and symbology as a sort of skin suit and in a way that we see many things
00:29:20.100
being used in the United States in similar fashion, but for different purposes.
00:29:23.460
But the point being is the, the life of the average person has gotten better.
00:29:29.220
And so I noticed that a lot of people in the China watcher world will refuse to just admit that basic
00:29:37.700
fact and will refuse to admit that this is the number one reason why you don't see, uh,
00:29:45.140
any massive rebellion against the central government, even with the restrictions of COVID,
00:29:53.460
And this is why, and you know, their, their culture tends towards collectivization and
00:29:58.020
is certainly different from Western culture in a variety of reasons.
00:30:01.060
Uh, but this is why that you, you never see these widespread rebellions or,
00:30:07.540
Like some people have been saying for 20 years, we'll be right back.
00:30:11.380
Human events daily, the global strategy session.
00:30:36.100
You know, we have an incredible thing. We're always talking about the fake news and the bad,
00:30:39.860
but we have guys, and these are the guys should be getting Pulisic.
00:30:43.300
Okay. Jack's back live, the global strategy session, global, globalist American empire or
00:30:50.900
American Republic. And we're on with the professor himself, Darren Beattie of Revolver News there.
00:30:57.060
And, uh, well, I just want to close off what I was saying there. And so one of the things that I,
00:31:01.460
I really learned in the, uh, you know, spending time in China was to say that, you know, the Chinese
00:31:08.100
government, they sure you can point to them. And, and, and we do quite frequently talk about
00:31:13.940
how they, they mistreatment of various parts of their society, but they really do do things that
00:31:19.220
are in the interest of China. They actually do think quite seriously and take very seriously how
00:31:26.900
they want to progress their country. They have these plans, they lay them out and then they,
00:31:31.620
they do them. And when they look at global trade, that's exactly what they look at. And you could say,
00:31:36.420
well, they're exploiting American workers. Of course they are. And they're exploiting their
00:31:40.180
own workers to achieve a comparative advantage. Of course they are, because that is the most effective
00:31:46.260
thing for them to do. And oh, by the way, when you look at the way world affairs have gone since 2022,
00:31:53.380
uh, clearly, uh, China in, in many ways is simply benefiting by not, not getting involved in any of
00:31:59.620
this nonsense that you see going on and, but also not cutting themselves off with Russia. So Russia
00:32:06.660
has to come to them as sort of a lender of last resort, um, type of situation. And, and boom,
00:32:12.420
there you go. You have, you have this BRICS block, which, you know, isn't necessarily as Darren,
00:32:17.300
you said, isn't about to overtake the United States and the Anglo American sphere, but it's certainly
00:32:22.900
emergent as a, uh, as a, as a real entity. And so the biggest thing that I learned coming out of
00:32:30.180
China is why is it that when I look at Washington DC and I go throughout Washington DC, we spend so
00:32:37.620
much time and everyone spends time, uh, obsessed with the wellbeing of people who don't live in our
00:32:45.460
country and nothing about the people who do live here. And none of these actions are done for the
00:32:51.940
benefit of America. They're done based on these various delusions that you outlined. And so the
00:32:57.380
biggest thing I guess I learned was why can't we have a brand of healthy regard for our own country
00:33:05.860
and our own actual interests? Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. And it's just an interesting
00:33:15.220
mix of, um, greed, corruption, and delusional fanatical, um, ideology in many cases, um, that applies to the
00:33:27.460
Middle East to some degree, it applies to Russia and increasingly applies to China. You know, the, the thing
00:33:34.340
about China that's, you know, you put so well is the Chinese government delivered a massive increase in
00:33:41.060
standard of living. In fact, they created thriving cities where 20, 30 years ago, there was literally
00:33:48.100
nothing. And so it's an authoritarian system. It's the worst surveillance state in the world outside,
00:33:55.460
perhaps of the UK, which might be on an even footing at this point. But the thing is the people get
00:34:03.220
something out of that. They have their liberties restricted, and they never really had liberties to
00:34:09.140
begin with that they in their historical memory, so it's less of an injury even there. But they get a lot of
00:34:16.180
value for it. They get, um, material well-being, they get increased standard of living, whereas the
00:34:23.620
circumstance in the United States, as I've described, is really the worst of both worlds. We have unprecedented
00:34:30.180
encroachments on our liberty, but we still have filthy and dangerous streets where our living is
00:34:40.820
plummeting. So it's this perverse combination of, at least if you're going to restrict our liberties,
00:34:47.220
have an incombinant increase in standard of living. But no, we have the worst of both worlds.
00:34:53.300
That's really kind of the problem. But then on the flip side of that, I would say the Chinese pragmatism,
00:35:00.980
which has served them so well. So you put it using the communist ideology as a skin suit. I say there,
00:35:08.660
China is no more communist than America is a liberal democracy at this point.
00:35:14.420
Do you know, um, that's, that's correct. Do you know Xi Jinping, or excuse me, Deng Xiaoping's famous
00:35:20.180
phrase on this? When they asked him if China is still socialist, he responded, uh, it doesn't matter
00:35:27.060
if a cat is white or black. It only matters if it catches mice. Correct. And that, that pragmatism has
00:35:34.980
served China very well, but it's also the ceiling. And this gets back to what I was saying earlier,
00:35:42.100
China is utterly lacking in any kind of global appeal or global charisma. And part of that is that
00:35:51.300
there's, you know, nobody is really entranced or enchanted by simple pragmatism. And so in a way,
00:36:00.260
the fact that America and the Anglo-American world is very much almost by necessity, by nature, driven by
00:36:08.500
by ideologies of universal appeal, driven by sort of cultural expression of universal appeal,
00:36:16.420
all of these things, which happened to be poisoned very deeply. But it is also the reason that America
00:36:24.580
can exert influence on the world in the way that China never could. And so,
00:36:29.220
Darren, when I, when I go, and I'm one of the last people, I guess, who actually looks at newsstands,
00:36:35.060
and I look at the New York Times cover every morning, I look at the Washington Post, the Wall
00:36:38.500
Street Journal, and then I'll look at those like novels and that, that they're put there, those,
00:36:43.940
those like dime store paperback novels. And it all seems to be, it's all about, it's either Russia
00:36:49.700
or the Middle East, Russia or the Middle East, all day long. If you're just some, some guy who's working
00:36:58.100
a job out in Ohio, or in Southern Maine, or any part of the United States, of what interest is that
00:37:07.540
to you? Of what direct interest is it to that story? And you'll see these stories as well in local
00:37:14.500
newspapers. And it's something where, you know, I don't know, maybe I have to take it up with the
00:37:20.420
estate of Tom Clancy, or I guess maybe like Jack Carr these days, and some of these other novelists,
00:37:25.460
where it's like, you're right, though, it is these fanciful notions of universal appeal
00:37:30.420
that really lead a lot of people down these paths. So we are the heroes, it's our job to save the world
00:37:36.900
from itself. It's our job to defend the world against these nefarious, I don't know, cartoonish
00:37:44.180
notions of the czar or the chairman is about to suddenly take over whatever. And it's it's
00:37:51.460
while we wallow in these fanciful notions, our own cities and our own infrastructure is crumbling,
00:37:58.660
literally, the bridge just collapsed in Baltimore Harbor, one of the biggest ports of the United
00:38:03.620
States, the federal government is bailing it out. And they might not even call it the Francis Scott
00:38:08.180
key bridge anymore on the site where the star spangled banner itself was written. And yet
00:38:14.020
nobody seems to put all of this together. Yeah, I mean, infrastructure is obviously a big one. And
00:38:20.500
that should frankly, also be just a basic metric of success in governance is do we have, it's another
00:38:28.420
thing that China has done pretty well. We have crumbling infrastructure, you know, obviously,
00:38:35.380
there are reasons for that our infrastructure is built before China. So it's easier to build
00:38:39.780
everything anew, but still, the amount of money that we've dedicated to it, and what we've gotten
00:38:46.580
out of it is simply scandalous. And so these are just the basic, the basic things, but sometimes the
00:38:53.620
basic things matter the most. So we've had all of these in curtailments of our liberties. And we don't
00:38:59.700
even have, you know, working bridges, we don't have working infrastructure in the way that we should.
00:39:05.380
And so, but just going back to this point about, you know, peoples cannot ultimately change their
00:39:13.540
natures, we are what we are, we are a certain way, the Chinese are a certain way, I think the Anglo
00:39:21.540
American spirit will always be animated by some degree of universal, universalism and universal appeal,
00:39:29.140
which is why it's been so dominant and successful in many ways. The problem is
00:39:33.460
that universal ideology and message is so corrupted and poisonous. And so the best case would be is if
00:39:40.500
we can go and kind of extract the poison from it and maintain the global charisma and appeal,
00:39:48.100
that puts us in a better position than even China, whose pragmatism, again, has served them well up to
00:39:53.540
a point, but it prevents them from achieving that kind of level of global influence that the West has
00:40:00.900
been able to attain. And I think that's right. And I think there is a and that would probably have to
00:40:08.820
be the subject for another episode about the differences in the cultures, the differences
00:40:13.860
in the civilizations that produces that. But as we go out, and I want to get to our final segment here,
00:40:19.620
let's, let's close all this out and talk about how America can build itself and rebuild itself
00:40:32.980
Jack is a great guy. He's written a fantastic book. Everybody's talking about it. Go get it.
00:40:44.980
And he's been my friend right from the beginning of this whole beautiful event.
00:40:49.060
And we're going to turn it around and make our country great to get to you. Amen.
00:40:52.580
All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back. Final segment, Darren B.D., the global strategy session.
00:41:00.980
So, Darren, we've we've gone kind of all the way around the world. We've gone from
00:41:05.780
Philadelphia in 1776 to the Beijing Olympics, as it were, of 2008, which is really China's sort of
00:41:14.740
coming out party on the international stage. And I would agree with you that while China has
00:41:19.060
and man, we're gonna have to do a whole episode on on why China has has hit a ceiling and why why
00:41:26.260
other countries aren't don't have that ceiling in other civilizations, but or civilization states,
00:41:32.420
as it were. We are not China. We are America. Our culture is different. Our demographics are
00:41:40.420
different. Our people are different. Our history is different. I don't believe that we have that same
00:41:45.380
kind of ceiling. And if we can get pragmatically the way forward, I'm just going to say the easiest
00:41:51.540
way to put it is take a look at what Elon Musk is doing. Look at what he is promoting. You don't
00:41:58.660
have to agree with every single thing he says, but the way he thinks of advancement and true progress,
00:42:07.380
I feel offers a true way ahead for so many of us on these issues.
00:42:14.260
Absolutely. You know, it's Elon, both Elon and Donald Trump are sort of quintessential
00:42:20.740
American success stories. I think Trump is the most American expression of being you can
00:42:27.380
ever think of that was instantiated in one person. Musk, obviously, in some respects,
00:42:34.180
as a foreigner, people, you know, kind of jokingly, but accurately say African American. And I think
00:42:40.660
in some ways, these, you know, Africans like, like Elon, and you know, a lot of the
00:42:48.660
PayPal crowd has some sort of provenance in Africa. I think that makes sense. Because again, these,
00:42:56.820
these African outposts embody some of that frontier spirit that has dulled a bit in the United States.
00:43:08.580
So I don't think it's simply accidental that a lot of these extremely successful entrepreneurs,
00:43:14.580
like Elon Musk, have some kind of African connection as sort of the last frontier as it,
00:43:22.900
as it were. But in any case, these are two figures who would not have been able to achieve their natural
00:43:31.700
expression in any other context, but that of the United States of America certainly could not have
00:43:38.340
happened in China, but it couldn't have happened in Europe either. Europe is almost equally antithetical
00:43:45.380
to the full expression of this human type. And I think this is the most encouraging development
00:43:51.140
we've seen in this country in a long time. If any configuration, if any kind of constellation
00:43:58.260
or alignment could produce the conditions for American, not only just American supremacy,
00:44:05.540
but for American flourishing of the American people, it's this combination of Donald Trump
00:44:12.260
and Elon Musk. So we'll have to see what happens. There's a lot of work to be done,
00:44:16.820
but I'm cautiously optimistic about the outcome.
00:44:20.900
No, I would be cautiously optimistic as well. And, and I love the idea of thinking forward.
00:44:26.340
Um, our, our, our destiny should be the stars. Our destiny should be this idea that America and our
00:44:37.380
civilization can, we hit the moon once. All right. We just did. Sorry, Alex Stein. We did. And then we,
00:44:43.860
and then we kind of stopped and we decided that rather than continue past the moon or to do anything
00:44:50.580
else on the moon, we would get involved in, uh, Eurasia. And then we would invade the Middle East.
00:44:58.180
And we would forget about Mars and we would forget about space exploration. And we would just sort of,
00:45:03.780
we would just sort of give up. And I think that's wrong. And I think it's nearsighted.
00:45:07.780
And I think that the people who are against these things don't have that ultimate sense
00:45:14.100
of vision and that ultimate sense of understanding the possibilities of what could be. And there are
00:45:22.340
times when you don't know what could be, you don't realize what, uh, what could happen, but you do things
00:45:29.700
things anyway, because you believe in a greater potentiality than simply the, the run of the mill
00:45:37.780
day to day. And so I think that's always been the American spirit. I think that if you look at the
00:45:44.660
history of the 1960s, I think that that had a lot to do with taking that spirit away. I think that the
00:45:51.700
cold war, uh, paid a huge legacy on America and both materially and psychologically that we're
00:45:59.780
still, still dealing with. And there's a lot of baggage of the cold war that not necessarily trauma,
00:46:04.660
but I'll call it baggage because that's what it is that we are still working through in our
00:46:10.180
government. And even you get these, uh, you know, these, these 40 year old and 30 year old cold
00:46:15.940
warriors that didn't even go through the thing. And yet they're still fighting the cold war. It's like,
00:46:20.420
guys, the, it is not the 1990s anymore. It is certainly not the 1980s. I want to bring the
00:46:25.940
eighties back, but you know, not, not all of it, but, uh, you know, just our final couple of minutes,
00:46:31.060
Darren Beattie to you, how would you sum it up? Well, I agree. And I think one of the laudable
00:46:38.580
aspects of Elon's approach to things is that he's thinking in the longterm, not even necessarily the
00:46:45.700
substance of his goals, but the fact that he's thinking of goals in the broader stretch in
00:46:51.540
civilizational terms of saying, okay, my goal is to be a space faring people. How do we set that up?
00:46:59.060
Is this consistent with the delusion or what he calls the woke mind virus and all of these things?
00:47:05.060
And he works from there. He backwards engineers from, from the goal and he's thinking in long
00:47:11.140
terms. And that's, that alone is, is somewhat radical for, you know, people in the American
00:47:18.420
economy, business people, most, most of the American economy and people at, at, you know,
00:47:23.380
in managerial positions, at least they're just thinking until the next earnings report or
00:47:30.020
entrepreneurs are just thinking, oh, how do I build this up just to the degree that,
00:47:35.540
you know, some bigger entity can acquire us. You know, nobody's thinking really in those longer
00:47:41.300
term, you know, ambitious contexts. And that's, again, that's something that's critical. It's,
00:47:47.460
it's an advantage that the deep state has. That's one of its defining features is that it can make
00:47:52.340
long-term plans. And so I think it's very encouraging to see Elon having this kind of long-term vision,
00:47:58.580
because I think that is critical for long-term success. Long-term vision for America and for
00:48:06.180
American success. This is your global strategy session with Jack Posobiec and the professor,
00:48:11.620
Darren Beattie. Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay ashore.