RadixJournal - February 04, 2026


Epstein ... Israel ... Russia ... China


Episode Stats

Length

30 minutes

Words per Minute

164.90822

Word Count

5,085

Sentence Count

338

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

24


Summary

In this episode, we discuss the role of Jeffrey Epstein as an agent for the Israeli government, his relationship with the Deep State, and how he may have been working for a foreign power. We also discuss the relationship between the deep state and Jeffrey Epstein.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 And so they're creating a lot of distraction around anti-Semitism, and that serves to say,
00:00:06.580 OK, well, the story, and this is what Nick Fuente said, and I hope he does, I hope he
00:00:10.800 evolves on this or maybe reveals more in the future and makes the story more multifaceted.
00:00:16.840 But right now, he says the story of Jeffrey Epstein is about Jewish power, that Epstein
00:00:21.960 was an agent for Israel, is furthering the goals of Israel.
00:00:25.740 That's the story, open, close, shut.
00:00:27.440 And see, I'm not like those radical conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens.
00:00:31.160 So he kind of does that meme where he's in the center and then maybe Michael Tracy is
00:00:36.100 on the right.
00:00:36.840 But then the conspiracy theorists have just gone like far to the left and, you know, on
00:00:39.960 this spectrum, and they've just gone wild and crazy.
00:00:42.060 He's just stayed right where he is.
00:00:43.580 Well, that's still not a complete picture.
00:00:45.760 It's not an accurate picture.
00:00:46.820 It's not one I would agree with.
00:00:48.720 This is really more of a story about how there is what I call a Chinese dissident faction that
00:00:54.840 are literally in the deep state.
00:00:56.300 Like Epstein, we're getting to the point where he is like an unofficial government agent.
00:01:02.620 He is a diplomat.
00:01:03.740 He is a money man.
00:01:04.980 He's he's part of the people running the global financial system.
00:01:08.340 So he literally is the deep state.
00:01:10.400 And the deep state is working for Russia.
00:01:12.440 The deep state.
00:01:13.160 Now, obviously, that's a one sided view as well, because there's two.
00:01:16.420 There's obviously we then get Victoria Nuland.
00:01:18.700 We get people who are like, no, we don't want to ally with Russia.
00:01:22.320 We have an opportunity here to unite Europe and unite NATO.
00:01:25.780 And we're going to pursue that strategy.
00:01:27.820 But the Chinese dissidents, you look at the text between Bannon and Epstein, and they're
00:01:32.780 calling Xi Jinping a peasant.
00:01:34.400 And they're saying, oh, these people can't create anything.
00:01:36.840 And the Chinese are just a race of, of, you know, autistic robots and slaves.
00:01:42.020 And we're going to crush them.
00:01:43.200 We're going to destroy them.
00:01:44.780 Now, if you really believe that, then allying with Russia makes perfect sense.
00:01:48.740 If on the other hand, you believe China is a faraway country, we're not going to go to
00:01:52.260 war with China.
00:01:52.980 We can trade with them.
00:01:54.460 They're creative in their own way.
00:01:56.260 Maybe they're not the same creativity as the West or whatever, but they have some, they
00:02:00.640 can, you know, help build the economy and make a better world.
00:02:03.200 So why don't we just work with them?
00:02:04.520 Whereas Russia is this revanchist, revisionist power.
00:02:08.060 We have no reason to cooperate with a country that has the GDP the size of Italy.
00:02:12.380 It, you know, we, we should be expanding into the East.
00:02:15.240 We should be uniting Europe.
00:02:16.580 We shouldn't be risking another World War III by breaking up the EU.
00:02:20.240 So these are diametrically opposed ideologies.
00:02:23.180 You could say both of them are competing within the deep state.
00:02:26.260 That there are two deep states.
00:02:27.600 There's a red deep state and a blue deep state.
00:02:30.460 And Epstein was clearly aligned with the red deep state.
00:02:33.260 Now, you know, who knows what would have happened when he donated to Ehud Barak and he was working
00:02:39.200 with Barak.
00:02:40.080 That connection was made on the grounds that I think Barak said, wow, Netanyahu has all
00:02:45.320 these connections with Putin.
00:02:46.840 I need somebody who can help me out with Russia because Russia is influencing Israel's elections.
00:02:52.400 And that's when all of this went down.
00:02:55.120 And that's when this huge split emerged that, you know, again, there's a gradual process
00:03:00.600 of an emergence.
00:03:01.320 You could say that we're almost splitting hairs here, but there's clearly what Jeffrey Epstein
00:03:07.920 envisioned as a path forward for a Russian-American alliance.
00:03:11.440 He did not have this full-blown Christian nationalist, like hyper-Zionist, like he did not envision
00:03:19.160 that type of coalition.
00:03:21.000 Or at least he thought it's a bigger tent than that, right?
00:03:24.400 We're going to have Noam Chauncey.
00:03:25.660 We're going to have liberals.
00:03:26.520 We're going to have leftists in this.
00:03:28.200 And at some point that coalition broke down.
00:03:31.580 You could say 2019 was an important year for that.
00:03:34.500 And of course, after 2022, there were very few liberals left in that coalition.
00:03:40.740 He may have been one of the last holdovers just because he had built up those contacts
00:03:44.400 over three decades.
00:03:46.220 And he probably couldn't.
00:03:47.600 It was hard to extricate himself from that after all that time.
00:03:50.880 But, you know, after 2022, it's very hard to envision the world of Jeffrey Epstein, where
00:03:55.900 you could be like just a sort of genuine liberal guy and, you know, a Steven Pinker type guy.
00:04:01.980 And then you go from that to, yeah, I'm going to support Russia like that.
00:04:07.460 After 2022, I think there was a coup within America, in a sense, in breaking apart those
00:04:13.460 two factions.
00:04:14.080 Like, no, if you're a liberal, we can't.
00:04:16.800 That door is closed.
00:04:18.360 We are not cooperating with Russia.
00:04:20.040 We are anti-Russia.
00:04:21.040 So that was a definitive moment that he didn't really live to see, but all of that was building
00:04:26.980 up.
00:04:27.860 So there's a huge geopolitical angle here that's being swamped by anti-Semitic conspiracy
00:04:34.760 theories and just conflating.
00:04:37.440 Oh, no, he was an agent for Israel.
00:04:39.460 I'm sorry.
00:04:40.040 There are other countries in the world besides Israel.
00:04:43.780 And that's the hyper focus and the schizophrenia and the single mindedness, the fetishization,
00:04:49.940 which is like a post-Christianity, right?
00:04:52.640 It is the element, this complicated love-hate relationship with Judaism that is at the center
00:05:00.420 of Christianity is now being secularized by these QAnon anti-Semites, and they can't see
00:05:08.120 anything else.
00:05:08.880 They can't envision a world without Israel because then Satan wouldn't exist.
00:05:13.180 And there would be no, you could really go back to Zoroastrianism.
00:05:16.560 The Jews are the Angrimainu and, you know, insert whoever multiracial working class anti-Semites
00:05:23.320 you want for the place of Mahura Mazda.
00:05:27.060 But that is the basic dichotomy is that you need, they need that dualism.
00:05:31.240 And so they're actually more wedded to Jews in a sense that they're, Jews are their foundational
00:05:39.380 myth.
00:05:40.320 And then you just kind of like slot in and out.
00:05:43.180 Well, today we've decided Hitler was good.
00:05:44.980 Oh no, actually Hitler was working for the Jews.
00:05:46.860 Now it's, uh, now David Ike is the hero and now Nick Fuentes is the hero, whatever.
00:05:51.640 You can just slot in people.
00:05:53.440 Kanye West is the hero.
00:05:54.820 So they don't actually have anything positive or constructive that they value.
00:05:58.500 They don't have any virtues.
00:05:59.500 They just have schizophrenic, hysterical scapegoating.
00:06:04.120 It is the mob.
00:06:05.920 Crucify him.
00:06:07.140 And Jeffrey Epstein's the new Adolf Hitler, as we said previously.
00:06:11.460 So yeah, this is not a, this type of thinking is what you would encourage if you are trying
00:06:17.440 to destroy democracy.
00:06:19.740 And by that, I mean the institutions of Harvard and, you know, the FBI, CIA, whatever you want
00:06:26.580 to destroy that so that you can do to America with the oligarchs did to Russia.
00:06:31.220 That's what Elon Musk wants to do.
00:06:32.660 That's what Peter Thiel wants to do.
00:06:34.060 They want to destroy Harvard, FBI, CIA, so that they can literally buy up the entire government
00:06:40.280 and rule over it as money men, as Crassus in ancient Rome.
00:06:44.020 And they want to do the same thing to China.
00:06:45.920 They want to destroy China so that people can become trillionaires by owning all of the
00:06:50.800 industry over there.
00:06:52.200 So it's a playbook.
00:06:53.440 The breakup, the Soviet Union is what they're trying to do to America.
00:06:56.340 It's what they're trying to do to China.
00:06:57.960 And I don't think it's good for world peace or prosperity, but I think it's very good for
00:07:02.820 these, these will be trillionaires at the top.
00:07:06.560 And Jeffrey Epstein was, was a part of that.
00:07:10.400 Yes.
00:07:10.640 So did the recent document dump change your opinion about Epstein at all?
00:07:19.360 I guess I'll just ask that as an open-ended question.
00:07:21.780 Do you think that something was revealed by this?
00:07:26.840 Yes.
00:07:27.020 I think the revelations about Russia went far beyond, you know, I originally, I knew
00:07:33.060 Veckelsberg and I knew that he had these connections with Russian models, whatever.
00:07:36.900 And I thought, you know what?
00:07:38.240 Jeffrey Epstein's a pragmatist.
00:07:39.560 He has friends and I have friends with, I'm friends with everybody.
00:07:43.440 You know, he had this kind of Trumpian attitude that he, he would get along with anybody.
00:07:48.680 He wasn't really ideological.
00:07:50.300 He would be friends with ideological people, Bannon, Dershowitz, he'd be friends with these
00:07:55.880 people, but he never really fully bought into the bullshit.
00:07:59.260 Kill, there's actually a meeting.
00:08:01.040 He, it's an email he sent to himself and he says, I was hanging out with these anti-Semites
00:08:05.960 and I said, why are you guys so anti-Semitic?
00:08:08.080 And they said, well, the Jews control the world.
00:08:10.500 And he was like, what evidence do you have for that?
00:08:12.120 And they were like, well, look at you.
00:08:13.320 You're one of the Jews that control the world.
00:08:14.700 He said, well, I got to give it to you.
00:08:16.160 You know, you guys are right.
00:08:17.340 And so he would literally hang out with anti-Semites.
00:08:19.960 He would hang out with people who were literal Jewish supremacists who were like, your percent
00:08:24.200 of Jewish DNA determines your superiority.
00:08:26.800 He would hang out with everybody.
00:08:27.940 And so this was my conception that, you know, Jeffrey Epstein didn't really have an ideology.
00:08:31.920 He didn't really have an agenda.
00:08:33.060 He wanted to make money.
00:08:34.380 He was influenced by the last person he was around.
00:08:37.120 He was influenced by Ghislaine Maxwell, who I do believe had an ideology.
00:08:40.900 And I still would stand by saying that I think Ghislaine Maxwell as a figure is distinct and
00:08:46.460 much less malicious toward kind of the EU and liberal ideas.
00:08:52.840 But yeah, he clearly had an antipathy toward China.
00:08:56.220 He clearly had, he saw potential in Russia.
00:08:59.620 He saw that Russia could be a crypto empire.
00:09:02.900 And this is basically what Bukele implemented is if the state buys up a bunch of crypto and
00:09:09.680 then that pumps crypto and it creates this feedback loop, you can make trillions of dollars
00:09:15.120 off that.
00:09:15.960 And Jeffrey Epstein was an early investor in crypto.
00:09:18.500 So the question is, was he a double agent?
00:09:21.280 You know, I think that's an open question.
00:09:23.360 Clearly he was an agent of Russia, but the secondary question is, was he a double agent?
00:09:27.880 Because in the emails, he says occasionally that it's not safe for us to talk about this
00:09:33.480 via email.
00:09:34.140 We need to have a meeting.
00:09:35.240 So he knew that the FBI had access to his emails.
00:09:39.000 And so if he was really like Michael Flynn, if he was really just like a traitor taking cash
00:09:44.380 from the Russians or whatever, then would they have allowed him to get that far?
00:09:49.180 Would he have been arrested much earlier?
00:09:51.600 The question, so that opens up a whole new slew of questions, which is that, is there a
00:09:57.240 faction within the deep state that's protecting Russian agents from arrest because it wants
00:10:01.940 to work with Russia in the same way that we have Israeli agents working in America who
00:10:05.880 are protected from arrest because of our control by Israel or influence from Israel?
00:10:10.460 So where they want to see how far they can go?
00:10:14.020 Yeah, they like, I mean, there's a lot of evidence on you by by allowing you free reign.
00:10:19.700 Yeah, there's a lot of ambiguity here.
00:10:21.340 And, you know, one of the kind of possibilities that would be less malicious from the point
00:10:27.400 of view of wanting to keep the EU together, wanting to keep NATO together would be that,
00:10:31.080 you know, Epstein was trying to rug pull Putin.
00:10:33.340 He was trying to get Putin to buy into all these crypto schemes so that then these whales,
00:10:39.080 these Western whales, Satoshi, whoever that is, would have the ability to go to the Russians
00:10:43.140 and say, oh, you're now dependent on crypto.
00:10:46.180 Well, we actually hold the keys to crypto.
00:10:48.280 And so you have to now do what we say.
00:10:50.780 So that's one angle on it.
00:10:52.200 But clearly, I think it's very unambiguous that the guy hated China.
00:10:57.100 He had no contacts with China.
00:10:58.580 He had no relations with Chinese people.
00:11:00.420 He just didn't like he was just racist against Chinese people.
00:11:03.920 And he wanted to destroy China.
00:11:05.880 And so that's very consistent.
00:11:07.920 The Russia pro-Russia sentiment aligns with that.
00:11:11.740 You know, I think he's a complicated figure.
00:11:15.000 I obviously here's the thing I'll say on an emotional level is when I discovered the Michael
00:11:20.160 Tracy thesis that there was no sexual blackmail, he wasn't raping kids.
00:11:24.300 This is all just schizophrenic stuff that's being promoted by Netanyahu.
00:11:27.860 And we know it's being promoted by Netanyahu and all of his downstream channels.
00:11:32.200 When you have to defend someone every day against the crime of pedophilia or whatever,
00:11:38.300 you start to develop a kind of empathy for that person.
00:11:41.420 You start to, in your mind, you start to say, those are the evil people.
00:11:45.200 And so he must be a good guy.
00:11:46.880 But, you know, it's like sunk cost fallacy.
00:11:48.620 And so I think I developed a rosy picture of this guy or rosier than maybe he deserved.
00:11:54.320 And I really do have some disagreements with his life work and his ideology.
00:12:01.180 I mean, I still try to understand and be objective about things.
00:12:05.360 But I definitely underestimated to the extent to which he, if he was alive today, I don't
00:12:11.580 know.
00:12:11.860 Would he have changed?
00:12:12.800 Would the invasion of Ukraine have changed any of his opinions?
00:12:15.580 I mean, we can't know that, but certainly he was instrumental in founding the alt-right,
00:12:21.740 the dissident right.
00:12:23.300 And even QAnon, his personal hacker, Vincenzo Yozo, sent him the Guccifer link.
00:12:31.680 June 15th, 2016, he says, looks fun, but the only important ones would be Hillary's secret.
00:12:39.400 And Yozo replies, I think you need to wait for WikiLeaks for those.
00:12:43.000 And this is, he's talking about the Access Hollywood tapes.
00:12:47.460 They're releasing all of this, you know, the Hillary emails.
00:12:50.080 So he was clearly driving QAnon.
00:12:53.840 He was driving, you know, I don't know, specifically Pizzagate.
00:12:57.420 I guess you could say that's part of.
00:12:59.060 There was a meeting with Teal, I believe, on the day that the Access Hollywood that is
00:13:04.500 Grab Him by the Pussy tape was released, which is interesting.
00:13:09.240 I doubt they were involved in the release of that.
00:13:12.840 I mean, Teal, at least ostensibly, was very pro-Trump at that point.
00:13:18.540 But perhaps it was a sort of meeting about a counter-strike that was coming in the next
00:13:26.160 weeks, which was the WikiLeaks email of the Democratic server that included, that was the
00:13:34.020 origin of Pizzagate and all sorts of stuff involving Hillary and Podesta.
00:13:40.320 Yeah.
00:13:40.700 And I think based off these meetings that are coming out, I have to give a point back to
00:13:47.880 the Russian hacker narrative.
00:13:50.340 Because, you know, this whole time I've been saying, look, there's clearly Israel has an
00:13:56.200 interest in promoting Trump over Clinton.
00:13:58.540 The reason why is her husband campaigned against Netanyahu.
00:14:02.520 She was literally secretary of state when the Iran deal was done.
00:14:06.360 Clearly, Israel hates Hillary Clinton.
00:14:08.220 They want Trump to win Kushner connections to Netanyahu.
00:14:11.680 That all makes sense.
00:14:12.960 Israeli hackers, notorious, use proxies.
00:14:16.520 They mask their ISPs as Russian.
00:14:18.660 They use Russian proxies.
00:14:20.280 Then the media says, oh, we found evidence that the ISP for these hackers comes from Russia.
00:14:25.700 And it's the most bullshit cover story.
00:14:27.880 And everyone just accepts it because, oh, well, we don't want to be anti-Semitic.
00:14:31.960 We don't want to be anti-Israel.
00:14:33.780 And so that's been my narrative for a while.
00:14:36.060 And I think that given the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was so pro-Russia and given the fact
00:14:41.320 that he does seem to be knee deep in all of this WikiLeaks, QAnon, all of this stuff,
00:14:47.660 the hacking of the DNC, Hillary's emails, I have to kind of give a point back to the Russian
00:14:53.020 hacker narrative and say that, you know, while I think what I said before is plausible,
00:14:59.060 and I don't think we should discount that, I also think, well, clearly Epstein is, he's
00:15:05.080 kind of acting on behalf of Russia when he is hiring these hackers.
00:15:10.040 I mean, I guess in this case, an Italian hacker.
00:15:12.160 But, you know, he's hiring hackers to push these narratives to save the election for Trump.
00:15:17.920 It was a close election.
00:15:19.700 You know, if you didn't have WikiLeaks, I don't see how Trump wins that election.
00:15:24.700 I mean, that's that moved independent voters.
00:15:26.980 And those are the voters who mattered.
00:15:28.780 He didn't win by appealing to constitutional conservatives.
00:15:32.760 He won by appealing to non-engaged voters, voters who were not Republicans, voters who
00:15:38.760 voted for Obama, voters who were.
00:15:40.860 And I talked to these people at the time.
00:15:42.720 And they're like, yeah, like weed smoking Bernie bros who were just totally disengaged.
00:15:49.100 They hated Hillary for beating Bernie.
00:15:51.780 And they were just like, well, I don't even like Trump, but I don't know.
00:15:55.460 This this stuff is weird.
00:15:57.400 Have you seen these paintings?
00:15:59.280 Have you seen, you know, these rich people and stuff?
00:16:02.460 I mean, that's how he won.
00:16:03.900 So, yeah, I mean, the the Russian collusion narrative is gaining some more credibility with
00:16:12.400 with the influence of Epstein.
00:16:15.600 I totally agree that that has been my takeaway.
00:16:18.660 And just to answer the question I asked as a prop, I actually do think these leaks have
00:16:24.500 changed my opinion, altered it a little bit.
00:16:27.320 And that is that he was deeper in with Russia than we imagined.
00:16:33.040 I want to talk.
00:16:34.780 I was talking about this with RFH, actually, over the last few days of a sort of more general
00:16:41.180 theory of Trump.
00:16:42.280 Have you ever seen this image?
00:16:45.340 It's actually from a scientific paper, but it's become a meme.
00:16:48.820 And it's a heat map of liberal opinion and conservative opinion.
00:16:54.680 And the liberal opinion, let's just imagine it as blue, is sort of centered.
00:17:01.520 It's like a concentric circle of you believe in equality in the welfare state.
00:17:08.080 And then there's some like opinions that seem to sort of emanate from that.
00:17:13.020 And then you have the right wing heat map.
00:17:15.800 And it's just all over the place.
00:17:18.400 It's here, there and everywhere.
00:17:19.620 And right wingers have been saying things like, well, this just shows that we're the
00:17:25.600 open minded ones.
00:17:27.080 Like liberals are totalitarian, they're dogmatic, et cetera, et cetera.
00:17:33.720 And that's maybe one way of looking at it.
00:17:37.020 Another way of looking at it is that the right wing is totally incoherent.
00:17:41.780 And they believe in the welfare state in certain circumstances.
00:17:46.780 They believe in anarcho-capitalism in certain circumstances.
00:17:51.240 They believe in the military.
00:17:53.400 They believe in the ICE agent should kill people or they should never kill anyone at all.
00:17:59.140 Like they're just all over the place.
00:18:01.900 And that really is what Trumpism represents on some level.
00:18:08.000 So liberalism has a core ideology, however hazy it might be at times.
00:18:15.520 It has a core ideology and then it has interest groups.
00:18:18.180 So it's like we help out the single women.
00:18:21.780 We help out the blacks.
00:18:23.780 We help out the Jews.
00:18:25.260 We help out farmers or whatever.
00:18:27.860 That's sort of its coalition is interest groups that are maybe even incoherent on some level.
00:18:33.420 You know, the Muslims and the single mothers are interest groups and they have nothing in common or whatever.
00:18:39.740 The right wing tried to do that.
00:18:42.760 It had policy and an ideology but no interest groups.
00:18:46.740 So it's like we're going to lower your taxes.
00:18:49.820 We're not going to give you any Gibbs goodies.
00:18:53.400 And we've got some foreign policy that's a little bit more aggressive.
00:18:57.700 They tried that.
00:18:58.840 I think the magic of Trumpism is that he is this screen that you project upon.
00:19:09.680 And his interest groups now are like Joe Rogan listeners who believe that Israel killed Kennedy or whatever.
00:19:20.740 His new constituency are people who believe that COVID was a plandemic and that they're all trying to kill us with vaccines despite Trump's overt actions on the pandemic.
00:19:34.900 He believed his constituency are Catholic traditionalists who want to install a monarchy and bring back the stoning of abortionists and adulteresses.
00:19:45.820 It's this radically incoherent group of people who just seem to all project upon him their hopes and dreams and fears and fantasies and desires.
00:19:59.080 And this really works when he's out of power and it doesn't work when he's in power.
00:20:07.300 And so where has Trump been successful?
00:20:10.380 He was successful in 2015 and 2016 when the alt-right had fantasies about Trumpian fascism and libertarians like Trump because he's anti-war or whatever.
00:20:20.740 He ultimately failed in 2020 he ultimately succeeded again in 2024 when the alt-right was expanded beyond proportion.
00:20:30.660 In fact the alt-right included people with podcasts that had 10 million listeners and so on.
00:20:37.620 And it's all about these sort of unhappy groups of cranks on some level that all project their mutually exclusive fears and conspiracy theories upon this man.
00:20:55.420 And he is this sort of post-modern president.
00:21:00.040 But that is what the right is on some level.
00:21:04.780 The right has no ideology.
00:21:06.360 It has conspiracy theories that Trump represents some sort of battle leader against.
00:21:16.100 And so I really think that is where we are in terms of the left-right divide.
00:21:24.340 The left is this fading 20th century ideology of the welfare state and the great society.
00:21:32.200 And the right is winning in many cases losing in others.
00:21:36.360 As a kind of coalition of discontented, crankish, schizophrenic freaks.
00:21:45.820 And that's a successful strategy as we've learned.
00:21:49.660 That actually can continue.
00:21:52.080 I don't think it's going away in fact.
00:21:54.600 Is there someone after Trump?
00:21:55.920 I don't know.
00:21:56.620 But that is the way to corral the right, is to corral all of these weird, incoherent people into the same barn where they can yell at each other but ultimately believe that Trump is their savior.
00:22:11.400 Precisely because he's so vacuous.
00:22:15.020 Precisely because Trump has no ideology outside of himself.
00:22:19.280 Precisely because it just seems to work in some weird, inexplicable way to view him as the one guy standing up against these forces of like liberalism and atheism or the Jews or the deep state or China or whatever.
00:22:36.880 Pizza eating child rapist.
00:22:39.420 Whatever it is, he seems to be the guy standing before them.
00:22:44.480 So that really is what the right has become.
00:22:48.140 Yeah, it reminds me of Cortez and the Aztec empire.
00:22:53.740 And, you know, there's among white nationalists have a concept of a race war.
00:23:00.440 That the white man came in, he just overwhelmed with his genius and his big brawny muscles.
00:23:06.100 What actually happened was it was a small contingent of 500 guys.
00:23:10.380 And they very quickly found these disaffected tribal forces that the Aztecs had been just, they were engaged in basically ritual genocide, where on like an annual basis, they would invade their neighbors, kidnap people and do ritual sacrifices.
00:23:29.000 They would never actually conquer their neighbors, they would never actually conquer their neighbors, they wouldn't integrate them into the empire, they would just go and kidnap them and sacrifice them.
00:23:36.640 And so when you look at these early battles of the Spanish conquest, it's not 500 Spaniards facing 30,000 Aztec warriors.
00:23:46.740 No, it's 500 Spaniards with 20,000 disaffected allies, non-Aztec outlying tribes, and then against the Aztecs.
00:23:56.880 And so it's really not a race war between black and, or excuse me, between natives and whites.
00:24:02.040 It's a, an inter-Nessine civil war.
00:24:06.240 It's a Nahu'an, the Nahu'ans were the principal enemies of the Aztecs.
00:24:10.320 It's a kind of Nahu'an revolutionary war, where these Nahu'ans, and similar to, you could, you could draw parallels to Haiti and Rhodesia, and other examples, South Africa,
00:24:23.300 where the supposed war that's going on in the surface, or these narratives that we have of this kind of black and white, it's actually more of an internal dispute.
00:24:33.940 And I think that's what's going on with Trump, is he is like Cortez.
00:24:37.860 He's a leader, he's a symbol, he's inspiring the disaffected, the people who are outside of the center.
00:24:43.080 They're not coastal elites, or they're angry with the coastal elites, they're disappointed.
00:24:47.100 And so they're all going to coalesce people who, in themselves, don't actually have the gumption to create a central state.
00:24:55.980 They don't actually have any central ideology, but they're willing to rally around this figurehead to destroy the empire.
00:25:05.180 Now, in the case of the Aztecs, of course, there was this plague going around, which wasn't intentional,
00:25:10.860 but that's what happens when you have isolated continents, and then you bring the plague over.
00:25:16.280 And so that certainly contributed to their fall.
00:25:19.920 You know, what is going to happen now with this Trump coalition?
00:25:24.380 Are they, and there are many different factions within it, but again, I come back to Musk and Thiel,
00:25:30.220 I think have a very clear incentive to destroy democratic institutions so that they can buy everything up.
00:25:38.140 Are they going to be successful?
00:25:39.480 And by the way, here's the succeeding question is, even if they are, let's say we get President Musk,
00:25:45.260 or whatever the hell he calls himself, he's going to be the Redditor-in-Chief.
00:25:49.900 Girls for the win, you know, that was a funny email from Musk to Epstein.
00:25:56.080 So even if he achieves his hopes and dreams, and he becomes Redditor-in-Chief, how long is that going to last?
00:26:04.100 Because he's going to have a mercenary empire.
00:26:06.480 And we saw this in Rome, right?
00:26:08.120 When the emperors started to be delegitimized by Christianity, you had all of these civil wars.
00:26:13.860 And that's why Constantine converted to Christianity, is because he was trying to mobilize the soldiers to his side.
00:26:22.460 He was trying to say, no, this isn't just another internecine mercenary war between random warlords in Rome.
00:26:29.800 No, we're on the side of Christ.
00:26:31.820 And so there's something substantive to this.
00:26:34.680 And that's why he converted.
00:26:36.100 So I think even if Musk, quote, wins, I don't think it'll, I mean, Crassus didn't have a very long run either.
00:26:43.860 So these people, these mercenary empires, Machiavelli writes about this, if you don't have a central religious theocratic principle undergirding the state, and it's just a mercenary state, and you're just paying soldiers to fight for you, well, they will fight so long as they, in their head, they're doing a calculation of like, okay, there's a 10% risk I'm going to die, but there's this percent chance I'm going to get my money.
00:27:06.880 And so that's worth it.
00:27:08.120 But if it's a, if it's a kind of, you know, last stand at Thermopylae, no, they're just going to run away.
00:27:14.500 You know, mercenaries don't actually have what it takes to fight balls to the wall.
00:27:20.460 They'll fight when it's convenient.
00:27:21.760 They'll fight when the odds are in their favor, but when it seems like they're probably going to die, they'll just run away.
00:27:27.800 They'll abandon the field or they'll turn around and do a bane from the dark night.
00:27:33.560 They'll go around and they'll actually attack their master.
00:27:36.220 That's what the Praetorian guard was assassinating.
00:27:39.120 And that's why they brought in a Germanic guard to guard the emperor because the Germans were considered less political than the Praetorian guard.
00:27:46.320 So this is how, how these mercenary empires work.
00:27:50.080 And that's my prediction is if Musk ends up winning in all of this, his reign is probably going to be short-lived.
00:27:56.720 You know, he might be assassinated.
00:27:58.280 There might be some kind of, you know, civil war of mercenaries, but it's going to be very unstable.
00:28:04.340 And I don't think it's good for America or the world, or it's, Musk thinks it's good.
00:28:09.220 He has the, he's blinded by ambition.
00:28:11.020 He wants to be at the top, but I don't think, I don't think even if he does win, I don't think he's going to be remembered as this great man, as a founder of new empires and the way that Caesar was.
00:28:22.380 I think he thinks of himself as Caesar, but I think he's more of a crassus.
00:28:26.420 And, you know, if there is to be a Caesar figure who ultimately can overcome these mercenary forces and actually reconstitute an American Republic into a formalized empire, you know, that's, that's a bit, you know, there's no figure that, you know, you can look at and identify and say, that's the guy, but there is that historical archetype.
00:28:49.240 So I have, I have that kind of long-term hope that even if these dissident forces overwhelm our existing institutions, that there is always a, there's always kind of a Napoleonic figure who can emerge out of that revolution, out of that chaos and reconstitute things.
00:29:08.980 So it's not totally, it's not totally over.
00:29:11.880 And I'm giving that optimistic.
00:29:13.160 I think such a person has to be a liberal, almost by necessity, actually, because a lot of people would talk this way about Trumpian Caesarism, but Trump is just clearly on the side of Russianism.
00:29:27.220 And I don't necessarily mean supporting Putin in Ukraine, although that, that is part of it.
00:29:33.640 He's on the side of dividing up the empire into fiefdoms of these shitty billionaires, basically.
00:29:43.140 So he's not a Caesar-like figure.
00:29:45.960 I think that person has to come from the liberals because the liberals have maybe weirdly and ironically established themselves as the party of the government.
00:29:55.840 Like, we are, we are defending democracy from itself in a way.
00:30:00.780 We are defending the state.
00:30:02.580 We're conservatives on some level.
00:30:04.680 We've developed this sort of woke liberal ideology as a management strategy for a multiracial country.
00:30:12.440 And so I think if there is a truly Caesar, Caesarian figure, someone who's going to defend the state, this person is going to come from the left.
00:30:22.220 And I'm not sure most people are ready to hear that.
00:30:28.300 But let me go to a couple of questions.
00:30:30.880 And then I want to go press, after we take the questions, I want to press a little bit harder on the Russian angle.
00:30:36.640 And then I want to press also on the alt-right Brexit Christopher Poole 4chan angle, which is fascinating, but that I don't want us to get out over our skis on this.
00:30:47.660 But let's go to these questions.