Rahim Kassam is the co-creator, co-host and editor-in-chief of the National Post podcast, and the editor in chief of National Pulse, a place I go daily to get my news. Rahim is also the founder and co-founder of Bannon's War Room and the National Pulse. In this episode, Rahim shares his perspective on the current events unfolding around the world, including the scandal surrounding Boris Johnson's boozy post-election party in which he was accused of having a "Bring Your Own Bottle Party."
00:00:54.000Is he now going to do the decent thing and resign?
00:00:59.000The famously unflappable Boris Johnson, the great political survivor, has finally flinched.
00:01:06.000He was hosting a boozy party in Downing Street.
00:01:13.000After an outpouring of condemnation for attending what critics allege was a bring your own bottle party
00:01:19.000by his official residence, 10 Downing Street in May, while the country was under strict COVID rules.
00:01:26.000The Prime Minister says he saw it as a work event, but finally made an apology of sorts.
00:01:31.000Even if it could be said technically to fall within the guidance, there would be millions and millions of people who simply would not see it that way.
00:01:43.000And to them and to this House, I offer my heartfelt apologies.
00:01:48.000Without actually admitting to wrongdoing and citing a pending investigation, his apology stoking even more anger.
00:01:55.000It's a potentially lethal blow to Johnson and a scandal that's made casualties of top advisers and staff.
00:02:15.000As a consequence of Joe Biden's failed leadership in the world, a rising China, globalist institutions flexing their muscle,
00:02:23.000pro-lockdown politicians ascendant, the world is on fire right now.
00:02:29.000And I could not have a better guest to discuss those issues than the guy I'm about to introduce.
00:02:35.000You know him as the co-creator, co-host of Bannon's War Room podcast, the editor in chief of the National Pulse, nationalpulse.com, place I go daily to get my news.
00:02:47.000And also the co-host of the National Post podcast, Rahim Kassam.
00:02:52.000Rahim, thank you so much for joining me.
00:02:57.000It's been a long time coming, I feel like.
00:02:59.000Well, I really view you as one of the top information operatives on the populist right.
00:03:05.000And you may resent and reject that characterization.
00:03:08.000But really, globally, you seem to see a lot of these trends as they're unfolding.
00:03:12.000And with events unfolding as fast as they are today, I can't wait to get your perspective on a number of things.
00:03:17.000But for those who don't know, Rahim was really the guy who was the catchment apparatus for all of the energy that was behind Brexit.
00:03:25.000You know, for many years there had been a populist movement in Britain, but really no infrastructure to support big election wins like you saw in Brexit.
00:03:34.000And I remember traveling around the country campaigning with Nigel Farage during the last presidential election.
00:03:40.000And he talked about how you would sit in the pubs in Britain, in London, and you would listen to the discourse and use that as part of the cauldron to churn out speeches and op-eds and press releases.
00:03:53.000And now as we see, you know, the UK, I think, revert to its establishment mean in Boris Johnson in much the way the United States has reverted to an establishment mean in Joe Biden.
00:04:05.000I wonder what you think about kind of what you see in the politics of the UK at this time.
00:04:10.000What's an amazing question for somebody like me, because I will try and bend anybody's ear off about what's happening in the United Kingdom right now.
00:04:19.000So thank you for that. I mean, predominantly, the way you surmised it is correct.
00:04:24.000In a post-Brexit world, you had the Conservative Party, which is by no means conservative. It's just a moniker nowadays.
00:04:33.000Re-establish itself as the electoral force in the United Kingdom.
00:04:40.000And they did a pretty good job of it. Boris Johnson got a whopping 80 seat majority in the House of Commons.
00:04:46.000It meant that he could basically rule as he wanted to introduce whatever legislation that he or his wife, which I'll get into in a second, wanted him to.
00:04:57.000And it hasn't worked out very well because as the Conservative Party always does, it kind of reverts to this establishment disconnected with the public type of governing philosophy.
00:05:09.000And now there are all sorts of scandals swirling around 10 Downing Street, which is the executive branch of the British government, not least to do with Boris Johnson's new wife.
00:05:20.000We don't have a constitutional role for kind of a first lady in the United Kingdom.
00:05:26.000So people are starting to ask questions because this lady Carrie, Carrie Simmons, Carrie Johnson,
00:05:31.000appears to be at the heart of so many decisions that are being made at the heart of the British government.
00:05:36.000A lot of the climate change policy stuff. She was very well entrenched with the Clinton initiative, for instance, used to work for one of their offshoots.
00:05:44.000People are starting to ask, well, where exactly is Boris Johnson getting his left leaning credentials from?
00:05:51.000Where is he taking this all from? And it appears to be her.
00:05:54.000And there are scandal upon scandal upon scandals which are building in the United Kingdom right now.
00:05:58.000If I were a betting man, I would say that Boris Johnson doesn't look like he could desperately hold on to power for much of this year.
00:06:08.000It does depend if there's a challenger from within the Conservative Party.
00:06:12.000But it looks to be a tumultuous year in British politics in the very same way it looks to be a tumultuous year in US politics.
00:06:19.000Well, is that a country that's just gone Rahim?
00:06:22.000I mean, one of the questions we have to ask in the United States is, you know, is the motherland kind of a thing of the past?
00:06:28.000Have they allowed so much unchecked immigration? Have they allowed a deconstruction of the social fabric kind of emerging out of the, you know, the how urban London became in the suburbs of London kind of flipping against those on the right?
00:06:46.000That that's a very difficult question to answer, you know, briefly.
00:06:50.000I'm reminded of an article that appeared in the Atlantic magazine just over the past couple of weeks that specifically talked about this.
00:06:57.000And it took to heart the idea that the United Kingdom is a functioning union at all.
00:07:03.000Of course, the Scots are always trying to leave. Increasingly, the English want the Scots to leave.
00:07:07.000You've now got this division in a post-Brexit world between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, which we know is Great Britain.
00:07:15.000I know there are all these sorts of different names for all these different territories in that really small plot of land, but they all mean something.
00:07:22.000They especially mean something to their native populations.
00:07:25.000And, you know, what the writer in the Atlantic concluded, and I actually couldn't agree more with this, which is very rare for me in the Atlantic magazine.
00:07:35.000But it is that there isn't necessarily a belief in Britain and there isn't a belief in Britain amongst the public, amongst the establishment, amongst the media, because there isn't anything such as Britain.
00:07:47.000Nobody's actually stepped forward and described what Britain is in the 21st century and where it needs to go.
00:07:54.000There's no long term strategic thinking. And as I sit here in the United States and look sort of wistfully back at a Britain I remembered growing up as a child and don't really recognize that in the modern Britain anymore.
00:08:08.000I see the same things going on in the United States today. Very, very little in terms of long term strategic imperatives that emanate from the institutions that we're told are supposed to do that.
00:08:23.000You could take the pandemic as an example. You know, the NIH, the NIAID for all these decades have told us that billions upon billions of your dollars, your American taxpayer dollars, have been funneled into pandemic preparedness.
00:08:35.000But then when the pandemic actually came along, there was no preparedness to be had. Well, the same thing occurs in foreign policy.
00:08:42.000You funnel billions upon billions as a nation into foreign policy, its apparatus, the institutions, all of that. Some wonderful buildings in Washington, D.C.
00:08:52.500But not any wonderful thinking that's coming out of them. And for Britain, this is as big of a problem, if not a bigger problem than the United States.
00:09:00.700I will always say, to quote Vera Lynn, there'll always be in England. What that England looks like, I'm not sure anybody has actually managed to put the sentences together that really describe it.
00:09:12.740And that's that's the biggest problem is a vacuum of ideas right now.
00:09:15.820And when we think about how history is going to judge the Boris Johnson era, you have to look at the government incompetence as well as the embrace of this this very globalist pro lockdown regime.
00:09:28.780And we've seen that embrace, you know, in other parts of Western Europe.
00:09:32.620I know you talk to a lot of the folks who serve in representative government throughout Western Europe.
00:09:38.460What are you hearing about sort of the reconstituting of the populist movement, the extent to which these new issues about health care freedom kind of inform on political activism?
00:09:49.020Is this a time when populism you think is is ascendant broadly there or are we going to see more of the Boris Johnson flavored surrender to to whatever is kind of churning out of these globalist institutions that that, like you say, have really failed the people of the world, certainly over the last several years?
00:10:07.220Well, you use a very interesting and this is a word I use a lot to institutions.
00:10:14.060Right. And in as much as we can complain about the corruption of the institutions as we've known them, in as much as we can point to the failures of the institutions as we've known them,
00:10:28.140I'm afraid the political right hasn't particularly done a good job of creating new institutions and it certainly hasn't done a good job of reforming old institutions.
00:10:37.740One of the things that I said when Trump first took office back in 2016 was there is this entity called the National Endowment for Democracy, which gets its money from Congress, hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
00:10:50.100And the president of the organization is appointed by the president of the United States.
00:10:54.500And there should have been a move initially in those first couple of months to use every single piece of power at the president in the president's fingertips to change the apparatus.
00:11:06.700You change the apparatus by changing the leadership. If you can't change the leadership and change the apparatus, you have to start again, start new institutions.
00:11:13.500Now, the populist, you know, cause around the world is only growing, I think, in steam.
00:11:21.040You're seeing people who I would have never thought that I would stand shoulder to shoulder with who are coming out as, you know, on our side on a whole range of different issues.
00:11:30.900I think of people like Russell Brand, for instance.
00:11:33.320I mean, I watched Russell Brand many years ago when he was in debate with Nigel Farage on the BBC one night and he was on the opposite side of the debate.
00:11:41.380And he was, we were in the green room and he was having his chest hair backcombed by one of his staff assistants, you know, to zhuzh up his chest hair so he could go on this television program and be this Lothario and get all these people to like him.
00:11:54.500And I just thought, oh my goodness, what an absolutely awful individual.
00:11:58.760I don't want anything to do with this person.
00:12:00.360And as time has progressed, you start to see people come around to a more populist way of thinking.
00:12:08.200I mean, hasn't Rogan really gone through a red-pilled evolution even over the last several months?
00:12:15.020A lot of the old feminist thinkers now are starting to realize as they come under fire for being TERFs and whatever the latest trend is of calling them.
00:12:26.000What do you do once you get a group of people together who aren't necessarily strictly ideological bedfellows, but who find common cause in things?
00:12:34.420Well, you're supposed to start institutions so that you can have these discussions, hash these ideas out and come up with policy proposals on the back of it.
00:12:43.180I'm afraid that barring some good conferences and things like that, the political right is actually pretty bad about setting those things up.
00:12:50.680We have some fusty old think tanks here in Washington, D.C. that churn out a white paper or two every so often.
00:12:55.400But you don't actually have the philosophical intellectual undergirding that you need to assist the populist movement into that next step.
00:13:03.800And that's what's missing in this equation to me.
00:13:08.380And yet, despite that infrastructure, you know, we do see successes.
00:13:13.840You know, and you were one of the early people to see that coming in the United States for Donald Trump.
00:13:20.280And I think that you saw a lot of the conditions that you were able to harness and really give an infrastructure to in Brexit starting to gel around the Trump candidacy.
00:13:31.220Is there anything that you can see regarding this political realignment in Western Europe that forecasts anything or teaches us anything about the way the balance of power might shift in the United States in the midterms or still too early to tell?
00:13:46.040Well, it comes back to your question about Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party.
00:13:50.320You know, I sat behind, there are pictures, much to my chagrin, of me standing behind David Cameron when he launched the Conservative Party's election campaign back in 2010 with Big Ben in the background and the River Thames and the House of Parliament in the background.
00:14:07.860And it felt like a real sea change moment after 13 years of failed Socialist Labour Party lack of leadership in that country.
00:14:16.640And of course, what did Cameron do the second he got into power?
00:14:20.360He made an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats and governed effectively as a Liberal Democrat, tried to get out of holding a referendum on the European Union.
00:14:31.960But there was nothing that came out of that government that was particularly revolutionary.
00:14:35.660There was nothing that came out of that government that was particularly conservative in terms of policy proposals.
00:14:40.680And so when I look at the midterms and I see everybody, you know, across the United States saying, rah, rah, sis, boom, we're going to win a red wave, it's going to be fantastic.
00:14:49.160I say, but what would be the point if you then have a leader McConnell, a leader McCarthy and a GOP chairman, Ronna McDaniel?
00:14:58.780It would be the same thing as watching David Cameron and Nick Clegg walking into 10 Downing Street and running the country as Liberal Democrats.
00:15:06.280So what the right must do in this country before the midterms is make sure that they have people in power, in situ, in positions that can either oust those people or hold them to account for the bad decisions that we know they are going to take once they get control.
00:15:24.180Well, and some of it in the minority is just such obvious theatre, right?
00:15:27.620Like, I remember when Paul Ryan put the bill on Obama's desk like 60 times to force him to veto to repeal Obamacare.
00:15:36.320And then when we actually had the power, well, he took all that money from all those healthcare lobbyists and all those healthcare institutions.
00:15:43.920And then lo and behold, it looked more like an embrace of Obamacare than a repeal of Obamacare.
00:15:50.360We ended up being vulnerable where John McCain was able to scuttle the legislation.
00:15:54.160And, you know, I look at Leader McCarthy's recent statements where he's saying, well, I'm going to throw Democrats off of committees.
00:16:01.720And I have to ask myself, Raheem, you won't even throw off Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
00:16:07.180Like, these two people are engaged in an active insurrection against the Republican conference through their membership in the January 6th committee that has just gone totally off the rails constitutionally and otherwise.
00:16:18.900And it's just hard to believe that McCarthy is going to remove Democrats from committees when he won't even remove Kinzinger and Cheney.
00:16:25.920And they openly are at war with the Republican conference.
00:16:29.500I mean, is there something you think I'm missing?
00:16:31.240Well, the good news is if they do end up behaving like we said they were going to behave, we can claim to have been right all along.
00:16:39.040If they don't end up behaving like we said they were going to behave, we can claim that we shifted them in our direction.
00:16:43.380But the broader point is this. I mean, we're going to be doing some reporting in the next, I hope, two weeks to a month that shows just where a lot of the hard earned dollars from ordinary Americans,
00:16:57.700when they sign those checks to the RNC, where that money's been going and who it ends up with in the long run.
00:17:03.900And I've been going through some of the data on this.
00:17:06.460Congressman, it's not good. OK, to say the least, it's not good.
00:17:09.920Law firms, advocacy groups, all of these sorts of things that you absolutely must get control of before you can trust the party apparatus again.
00:17:19.060I struggle to think of anybody now in the Republican movement that I talk to at all who trust the apparatus.
00:17:26.940And you simply cannot go into a situation where you have a majority in the House, but you don't trust the apparatus at the top of that.
00:17:33.700So this will be our focus for the next several months at least.
00:17:36.300The National Pulse dot com is where folks can check out Raheem's reporting, also co-host of the National Pulse podcast.
00:17:45.260And of course, one of the co-creators and co-hosts of Bannon's War Room.
00:17:49.940Raheem, you were one of the people during the Ukraine impeachment to really understand that Ukraine wasn't just a country that had been randomly selected.
00:17:59.820No one sat around and threw a dart at Ukraine and said, well, that will be the basis to set up Donald Trump, that actually Ukraine is really is really viewed as a critical player in the overall NATO expansion strategy.
00:18:14.660And when you seek NATO expansion and you're deeply corrupt, as the Biden family is, the ability to plow cash into Ukraine is something that can benefit the elites to a greater extent even than plowing money into other European countries.
00:18:32.460Now, as you see, you know, the relationship between the United States and Ukraine under Joe Biden, what's your perspective on that?
00:18:40.260And then obviously we're going to get to this standoff at the border with Russia.
00:18:45.280Yeah, I mean, Ukraine is the whole situation is is is so wildly out of control now that it's been going that way for some time.
00:18:56.940I was there during the Medan Revolution in Kiev in late 2014, I believe it was, and saw firsthand what we were being told in the West was this.
00:19:10.260Spontaneous uprising of ordinary people who was just trying to throw off the yoke of this totalitarian dictator who had just been elected, reelected.
00:19:21.600And I got on the ground and I sort of started to get to grips with the different factions and whose interests were playing into all of this.
00:19:28.680And it was really this one moment where I was in the middle of that square, looking at the stage, very nice, you know, audiovisual set up, lots of money clearly been pumped into that moment for the world to see.
00:19:40.020You know, these these color revolutions that one of your regular phenomenal guests, Darren Beatty, is always talking about, saw that playing out in front of my eyes.
00:19:50.660And it was a moment where there was an EU sponsored tent.
00:19:54.260It was almost like you were a fair. Right.
00:19:56.800And there was a tent and you could go up to this tent and pick up an EU flag and stand in the crowd and wave this EU flag.
00:20:02.620And it got me thinking, you know, what is this expression of this like supranationalism that's going on here in Ukraine and why is that taking place?
00:20:11.680And I started to do some digging on this.
00:20:13.380I actually came to the issue totally, you know, bereft of any loyalty to any side.
00:20:18.660I just wanted to see what was taking place, honestly, on my doorstep.
00:20:22.280I mean, three and a half hours flight away from from London Heathrow Airport or whatever it was.
00:20:26.620This was an extraordinary time to see something take place in real time.
00:20:32.220And the more we dug into it, the more we started to realize that actually what was going on on Russia's border, i.e. Ukraine,
00:20:38.660was this continuation of the idea that Russia was going to somehow try to militarily overwhelm Europe and NATO.
00:20:49.180Now, you can make of that what you will.
00:20:52.200And I know Barack Obama had his thoughts on this when debating with Mitt Romney,
00:20:57.060talking about, you know, the 1980s wanting their foreign policy back.
00:21:02.140But whatever you believe about whether or not Russia poses a threat to Europe,
00:21:06.040the way to not go about forcing the West into an active war is to actually position troops right upon that border
00:21:14.860and actually say to Russia, hey, we're closing you in here.
00:21:18.700You know, there's an old expression, I think some attribute it to Machiavelli, whatever,
00:21:24.360that says, you know, always give your enemy an ability to retreat.
00:21:29.160Because if you don't allow your enemy the ability to retreat,
00:21:33.100then you're going to force them into a standoff with you.
00:21:35.460And that standoff is what we're seeing take place right now.
00:21:39.220Luckily, I don't believe in my heart of hearts that Vladimir Putin does actually want to get into a prolonged war on that border
00:21:49.240and doesn't want to force NATO to actually solve a lot of its internal problems with mobilizing troops in Europe.
00:21:56.100For instance, I'll give you an example.
00:21:57.560I was talking to a pretty high level source who's involved in a lot of the NATO war gaming recently.
00:22:02.900And he told me that the Russians could effectively march to Madrid before each separate parliament across Europe would give the OK to their troops
00:22:13.400to run under the NATO commanders to actually fight back if the Russians tried to invade in Ukraine.
00:22:19.220And it's kind of a jarring thing to hear this, to say, OK, so a lot of what we're seeing is posturing.
00:22:25.400But a lot of what we're seeing on the other side is posturing as well.
00:22:28.400Then how do we actually tamp that down?
00:22:30.440We tamp it down by coming to the table and saying, well, here are the problems that Russia has.
00:22:35.220Here are the problems that the United States has.
00:22:36.940And that's what's happening right now.
00:22:38.400I mean, it doesn't it doesn't please me at all to say this, but where the United States stands today after the conversation that was had between the Russians and the Americans on Monday morning
00:22:50.680is actually probably one of the first, albeit tiny, wins that Joe Biden has had in a foreign policy sense for a long time.
00:22:59.040And that could be attributable to what's happening in Kazakhstan as well.
00:23:02.780Or it could just simply be attributable to the fact that Vladimir Putin was after one thing and one thing only during this whole fracas over the last couple of months,
00:23:10.900this war of words that we've seen taking place in the media, which is to say, you guys are going to have to recognize that we will not accept Ukraine as a NATO power.
00:23:20.180And it does seem to me that the Americans and NATO are starting to accept that if Ukraine is subsumed into that NATO power structure,
00:23:27.900then they are going to have a hot war with Russia, which they are not prepared for, as I just said.
00:23:33.860And it seems that Putin does have outs if he's able to obtain those concessions on the expansion of NATO.
00:23:40.660And, you know, there are basic questions sort of about the the viability of the Ukrainian government.
00:23:47.500And we always seem to see like the war hawks tell us that it's the obligation of America to go and prop up governments that seem to have a whole lot of their own problems.
00:23:58.020And I wonder whether or not Europe wouldn't be more persuasive as the energy market for a lot of that Russian LNG than the United States trying to assert itself in this resolution somehow.
00:24:10.060But, you know, it'll be remain remain to see, you know, I think what I see right now, Raheem, is that there are three principal vectors of global power competition.
00:24:19.980There's Russia, which offers regime preservation.
00:24:23.780I mean, like if you're a regime and you're about to topple, Russia is probably the best friend to have in the world right now.
00:24:30.380I mean, go ask Assad, go ask Maduro in Kazakhstan.
00:24:33.520You saw somebody who really came into political power, not as some stooge of Russia, leap into the arms of Vladimir Putin.
00:24:42.380I mean, one of the first phone calls that Tejib Erdogan got during that coup in Turkey was from Putin saying, we're here to help you.
00:24:50.040So regime preservation is kind of the Russia model.
00:24:52.880Then you go to the China model, which no one has covered better than the National Pulse.
00:24:58.780A lot of you are reporting getting into the way that China basically just buys people off in big tech, in government, and uses that bribery system, that cash system to really fuel the, you know, one belt, one road strategy.
00:25:15.180And then the United States value prop is we're the best friend to have in the world if you owe people money.
00:25:20.080Like if you are a debtor nation and you owe money to globalist institutions, we could kind of keep the banker off your back that long.
00:25:27.800And I'm just kind of wondering, you see, as you see these flashpoints around the world, how that is going, and particularly through the lens of the terrific reporting at the National Pulse that's covered the Chinese Communist Party's malign influence campaign that seems to be pretty darn persuasive without a whole lot of hot lead flying.
00:25:45.820Right. And that is one of the most terrifying things is that there is a power in the world now that is able to quite, I wouldn't say easily, but at least, you know, they have a lot of people who are amenable to how much the Chinese Communist Party is willing to throw its weight around.
00:26:09.380A lot of this comes from the fact that, I mean, I want to bring it back to the institution point.
00:26:16.220I don't think America has a very serious long-term strategic foreign policy anymore.
00:26:24.460I'm actually of the belief that it hasn't really had that for most of America's history.
00:26:30.300There were some periods of time where you didn't really want to interact with the rest of the world.
00:26:35.020We are very cognizant of the fact that...
00:26:37.900In fairness, you would barely give us credit for the Revolutionary War.
00:26:41.040That's also true. That was a fight between an Englishman and other Englishmen.
00:26:45.800But I just, you know, the idea that there is a consensus view about where America stands in the world amongst its own foreign policy institutions is completely incorrect.
00:26:59.420The idea that there is any kind of cohesive foreign policy from administration to administration, by the way.
00:27:30.240I would give the fact that the right has given up on foreign policy.
00:27:36.000And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that America is probably the predominant nation in the world where I find it difficult to get international news.
00:27:44.900Because your populace and your news media are kind of not really in the weeds on it like other places are.
00:27:54.520I mean, three out of four of every front page newspaper that you see in the United Kingdom on a weekly basis, the front page story will be about something that's happening elsewhere in the world.
00:28:06.360You don't really get that in the United States.
00:28:11.440But that would bring me back to the point that I'm trying to make about the idea that the institutions don't really have this sort of common thread.
00:28:20.940Now, the right has, I think, as a result of this lack of interest.
00:28:24.600I mean, nobody really votes for a government in the United States based on their foreign policy.
00:28:29.620And I think the right has given too much up in that regard.
00:28:32.500And so what you had is you had the neoconservatives who were Democrats, who were leftists, who were a lot of former communists, who have been allowed to kind of run the institutions in terms of foreign policy for several decades.
00:28:49.060And as we know, there are a lot of now right wing institutions that take the neoconservative interventionist line on so many things.
00:28:55.820But there has to be an America first foreign policy that it can't it can't just be we don't care about what's going on overseas.
00:29:02.860It can certainly be that it ranks far lower.
00:29:05.700But when you come to issues like this, when you come to issues, I think Trump did a wonderful job with NATO, by the way, you know, reading them the right act and telling them to pull their socks up and pull their weight on the world stage.
00:29:16.800And they actually tried to do it while he was in office.
00:29:20.000And then, of course, you have a return to this old, fusty mentality.
00:29:24.420Listen, here's here's everything you need to know about American foreign policy right now and the lack there of it, which is that the United States institutions fundamentally still at their core believe that flying,
00:29:35.700the LGBT flag or the transgender flag from an embassy somewhere around the world is somehow making a point.
00:29:42.500And the only point it makes to most of those countries is that America is an unserious nation on the world stage.
00:29:48.200This is what I mean when I say there has to be a renewed interest in what America's role in the world is amongst the America first movement.
00:29:55.560And that can only come by forcing these Democrats out of these institutions and taking a role in foreign policy again.
00:30:02.000Well, and ensuring and ensuring that the Republican Party doesn't just become the controlled opposition on a lot of these, which it is, which it is.
00:30:09.880Well, but, you know, I tell you what, I do see optimism in this new batch of people that are running for Congress increasing.
00:30:15.640I mean, you would have never seen even two cycles ago people talking about a focused foreign policy rather than, you know, invade everywhere, invite everyone.
00:30:24.740Right. And now you're starting to see that in more and more of the candidacies that I think are compelling to voters.
00:30:29.880So we'll see. You know, that's why we have elections in our country.
00:30:34.240And it's certainly my hope that the foreign policy that the Republican Party embraces looks a lot less like Dick Cheney and more like Donald Trump.
00:30:43.140I think that will ultimately be viewed better by history.
00:30:46.220I think that is the way to preserve and utilize American greatness to its fullest extent, not to squander it for people that, frankly, are undeserving of our best.
00:30:56.380And, you know, these issues are kitchen table issues in northwest Florida because it's my neighbors that actually go fight these wars.
00:31:02.960It's, you know, the schools in my district that are without the room mom when somebody has to deploy and when they have to do it eight, 10, 11 times, you know, in circumstances that that I think have been have been dubious as a consequence of poor leadership, not diminished patriotism on a part of our fighting force.
00:31:22.740I think that the Biden regime is going to be judged by a lot of their decisions as they unfold.
00:31:29.240And if they squander American greatness, I think that the American people will not take kindly to that.
00:31:35.000Rahim, I want to ask you one last question, and it really has to do with with China, because at the National Pulse, we see every major China story breaking.
00:31:44.100You have covered the fusion of our technology companies and China, our government leaders in China better than than really any site that exists right now.
00:31:54.440What worries you most about China's strategy and really the lack of resistance that our country has put up to it?
00:32:01.880Well, what honestly worries me most is that for some reason it comes down to myself and Natalie Winters to pick up on these stories.
00:32:10.700That is that is genuinely the thing I don't get about all of this, that, you know, we barely scratch the surface of so much of what's going on.
00:32:20.380We can pick up on a trend here or a funding stream there or a staff are moving from this place to the other or whatever it is.
00:32:28.960But it terrifies me that there isn't the journalistic interest in what China is doing.
00:32:34.820I mean, the amount of land China is buying through its through either individuals or through businesses across the United States is absolutely staggering.
00:32:45.480But you know why there isn't the journalistic interest.
00:33:07.300And everybody is allowed to, you know, almost freely and thanks to places like Getter now a little bit more freely in the social media space can investigate these things and get these things.
00:33:18.880I mean, look, Natalie came to me as a as a, you know, somebody still in college who just cared about the future of our country and wanted to investigate this stuff.
00:33:26.520I came to this issue as somebody who recognized how foreign money and foreign interest had already poisoned the well of so much of Europe and my country, the United Kingdom.
00:33:35.000And so I wanted to make sure America knew what was happening here, too, and tried to stop it.
00:33:39.220And so my message would be to people out there.
00:33:41.240There is no special source that we have at the National Pulse that allows us a unique level of intrigue and interest into this subject area.
00:33:49.900We just do the hard work of the research and going to the source documents and finding out all of this stuff.
00:33:54.960And I implore more people to do that because this is going to come down to good, old fashioned, what I think is a very American thing of rolling up your sleeves and getting into the muck of it yourself.
00:34:05.360Right. This is how we ended up effectively.
00:34:07.980I wouldn't say defeating Marxism because I think it's right here on these shores now, but at least deferring for a generation the perils that were attempted to be foist on us by foreign powers.
00:34:17.680And we've got to do that all again. And it's going to come from the grassroots upward.
00:34:22.660The Chinese Communist Party will stop at nothing.
00:34:25.800There is never a time where Xi Jinping is going to go, oh, I'm so sorry about all of that, guys.
00:34:30.940I didn't realize I was making life difficult for you.
00:34:33.920The evils of this world will only be stopped when you, the people, confront those.
00:34:38.280And I truly believe that America is the last place in the world where that's going to happen.
00:34:41.560If it doesn't, this is a we're looking at a Chinese Communist Party run future the world over.
00:34:46.480And I not even the world over, frankly, out of this world.
00:34:50.060We're looking in the next 100, 200 years of of technological changes, the likes of which we can't even fathom right now.
00:34:58.120Do you really want to leave that up to the Politburo in Beijing?
00:35:02.040No, I am not here for it. That's why we're fighting back.
00:35:05.600He is the editor in chief of The National Pulse, the co-creator and co-host of Bannon's War Room, co-host of The National Pulse podcast.
00:35:13.400This is the third best podcast he will be on this week.
00:35:17.280Raheem Kassam, thanks for being on fire, Brand.