The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Iran War Turns 6 Months Old ｜ Guest： Firas Modad ｜ 9⧸4⧸26

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00:00:58.180 all right guys it's been six months to slow the shia uh we have officially hit the six month

00:01:06.580 anniversary uh it's now six months old of the iran war uh obviously a lot of people said that

00:01:13.760 we ultimately needed to do this quick get in and get out you know make that quick strike that we're

00:01:19.380 always promised and then we'll be fine we'll get back on track everything will be fine for the

00:01:23.420 midterms. Now it seems like everybody, even the mainstream political commentators who supported

00:01:28.240 the Iran war are talking about the disaster that will be coming up in the midterm. So what is the

00:01:34.360 state of the Iran war? Are we any closer to seeing a way through this? Is there a victory in sight?

00:01:40.820 Will there be some way to salvage those elections? Join me today to discuss this is Faraz Modad of

00:01:46.840 The Lotus Eaters. Thank you so much for coming on, man. My pleasure. My pleasure. Always good to see

00:01:51.160 how are you doing well doing well before we dive into iran though i know that's the key topic the

00:01:57.360 reason you're here is your geopolitical commentator however uh we do have a major

00:02:02.260 news announcement coming out uh obviously the lindsey clancy trial has been going on and there 0.99

00:02:08.680 has been a huge culture war over this uh it seems like there is a sizable uh a percentage of women

00:02:16.040 still probably the minority but a sizable percentage of women who want to validate

00:02:20.180 what Clancy has done. There seems to be very little argument from the prosecution itself that

00:02:25.340 Lancy is guilty of the crime. The only question is, was she temporarily insane when she committed

00:02:30.620 that crime, even though there's been many, many women on Tick-to-Tock and other places coming up

00:02:34.860 with conspiracy theories about how her husband did it and all this stuff. Ultimately now,

00:02:39.980 the trial has come down to one man. Apparently, there were nine women and three men on this jury.

00:02:47.220 uh there was a consensus with 11 of these people so two of the men uh and the rest of the women 1.00

00:02:54.640 all decided to find lindsey clancy not guilty which seems absolutely mad uh she's obviously

00:03:01.380 guilty uh this was not a crime of passion this was not a crime that was influenced by spur of

00:03:06.240 the moment uh you know loss of sanity or control uh this was a cold-blooded systematic murder

00:03:12.320 planned in advance uh required you know lying to the husband getting him in the house for extended

00:03:17.420 period of time a slow assassination of each one of these children nothing about this you know smacks

00:03:23.560 of impulse or a desperation uh and yet uh it seems that 11 of these people were willing to say that

00:03:30.860 ultimately she's not guilty because she was on medication or something uh there's one guy left

00:03:36.260 uh apparently who stood against this and that that patriot that lone bulwark that that last

00:03:42.020 stand for for human civilization uh has been called out by the defense uh they announced that

00:03:48.400 there's one man basically holding up the entire case which means that that person's obviously 0.76

00:03:54.400 going to get destroyed uh the crazy tiktok women are going to go after this person and absolutely 0.61

00:03:59.480 uh destroy them uh but that means we are getting a mistrial luckily uh the the quick stay was 0.99

00:04:06.780 ultimately uh vacated and the mistrial has been uh validated so there is going to be a new a new

00:04:12.800 judge a new trial new jury the whole nine yards but for us are i know that this is honestly this

00:04:19.480 is one of the you know this is one of the darker moments for any civilization uh but what are your

00:04:25.100 reflections seeing how this trial has played out? Briefly, women shouldn't vote and they shouldn't 1.00

00:04:33.620 be in positions of political power. Most men shouldn't vote, I would argue, but women definitely 1.00

00:04:41.860 shouldn't vote. The issue here isn't just the minority of women. It's the nature of the arguments 1.00

00:04:47.680 that are being presented. And you can break these up into the following. There's a cohort that's

00:04:53.700 arguing she was too depressed she was mentally unstable you don't understand postpartum you

00:05:00.260 don't understand the difficulties of being a mother all of that stuff you don't understand 0.53

00:05:04.020 female hormones etc etc etc their argument essentially is women aren't responsible for

00:05:12.500 their actions right and that is a horrifying admission it's something that every man knew

00:05:20.780 before the 20th century, but it is a horrifying admission for the modern world. The second line

00:05:26.740 of argumentation is a mother couldn't be capable of that kind of evil. It must have been her 0.70

00:05:34.980 husband. That is a failure to understand human nature. If you contend with human nature honestly,

00:05:44.600 you realize that we are capable of enormous evil insane levels of evil and if you are

00:05:53.300 constitutionally incapable of understanding the potential violence and the potential evil that

00:06:00.220 we hold within us you shouldn't be involved in major decision making because that should be

00:06:06.840 left to people who have a better grasp of reality. And whichever way these women came to conclude 1.00

00:06:17.140 that Lindsay Clancy should be found not guilty through the conspiracy theory side or through the

00:06:23.440 you don't understand female hormones side, the result is pretty much the same. It is disqualifying. 0.89

00:06:30.100 And of course, I don't mean to say all women are incapable of understanding these things, 0.61

00:06:34.360 etc etc i'm not saying that i'm saying that as a precautionary principle if women are

00:06:41.480 constitutionally formed to not be able to understand evil or if they are saying that

00:06:47.200 their hormones preclude them from being held responsible we have no way of testing which

00:06:53.820 women should be involved in life in political life and which women shouldn't be and the natural 1.00

00:06:58.940 conclusion is all of them shouldn't be. You get an exception here and there, you get very wise 1.00

00:07:04.760 women here and there that we should listen to, but responsibility lies with men because politics is

00:07:11.160 on the same spectrum as violence. And that requires an enormous level of responsibility 0.96

00:07:19.080 to be exercised judiciously. And those who don't understand that are, like children,

00:07:26.680 incapable of participating in political life so there's a lot there uh and a lot of it is true

00:07:35.140 um i i think maybe the best line you just had there was politics is on the same level of

00:07:42.140 violence as violence um this this is something that has

00:07:46.660 due to the relative blessed nature of the west and particularly the united states

00:07:54.460 this reality has been allowed to atrophy in our civilizations you obviously come from a country

00:08:04.140 where this is far far too obvious but for those who have lived under the shelter and protection

00:08:11.200 of western civilization they do not grasp that politics and violence are not exclusive they are

00:08:20.420 actually in the same realm that ultimately all politics is undergirded by violence the reality

00:08:25.220 of violence and that politics is ultimately something that is existential we try as hard

00:08:34.200 as we can to avoid entering the state of purely existential politics and we have done so in the

00:08:39.920 united states for the most part there's been a couple of moments like the american civil war

00:08:43.860 uh where that was not the case but we have largely been blessed uh to be able to avoid this uh but

00:08:50.960 when you avoid it for too long as with anything else right whenever you don't see the consequences

00:08:56.040 you forget the reality behind the scenes and so we have been able to lull ourselves into the idea

00:09:01.900 that uh politics is about walking into a voting booth and pressing a button every four years 0.54

00:09:07.620 and if you think that's what politics is then there's no reason for women not to participate

00:09:11.880 in it they can push a button just like anybody else but ancient the ancients understood that

00:09:17.980 when you have say a republic what makes you a citizen of the republic is your ability to do

00:09:24.120 violence it's your ability to fight and defend on the half of the state you don't have citizenship

00:09:29.680 in a republic because you just happen to be a certain age you hit 19 inside the borders of the

00:09:34.740 republic the reason you have citizenship is that the citizen is he who has arms as aristotle

00:09:41.640 remind us that the citizen is he who is willing to put his life on the line and defend the republic

00:09:46.820 and even though obviously the average american male is not going to do that today they at very

00:09:52.960 least have the requirements to do so as where women do not they are not subject to this now

00:09:59.000 i have been making the point that you made uh here that we have to make a decision about 1.00

00:10:04.360 what the reality of of women is either women are fully agentic individuals capable of making their 0.92

00:10:13.180 own decisions and being held responsible for them or women are in some way of diminished capacity 0.99

00:10:20.120 in this realm not making them less human not making them less loved by god but making them 0.62

00:10:26.080 less capable in this realm of politics to be able to operate a public life and we have to choose one

00:10:32.480 of those two and we have to be holding accountable and since it's very clear we're never choosing 0.99

00:10:37.300 number one we're just never doing that we're never going no matter how unless you're in ukraine 0.53

00:10:41.980 that's sure that's fair that's fair yeah if you kill your way through every ukrainian uh then 0.60

00:10:48.760 man then i guess eventually you do have to get to the women by the way still the most despicable

00:10:53.840 thing i've ever seen in my life american politicians saying that we should just you know 0.99

00:10:57.840 kill every russia we can till every ukrainian is dead is one of the most horrific things i've ever 0.86

00:11:03.960 seen but that's an aside i think what really is now the more important thing the signal that is 0.99

00:11:12.340 being sent in this current trial environment is that obviously what the defense is doing

00:11:18.620 is sending a signal that uh all these tiktok women should go after the one man who's the holdout 1.00

00:11:23.840 they will find this guy they will destroy his life i'm i you know i will place all of my money 1.00

00:11:30.760 i will place my house mortgage on this that that they will go after this person and they will dox 0.58

00:11:35.480 him and they will harass him and they will make all these conspiracy theories about him there'll 0.87

00:11:39.700 be endless youtube videos about this juror uh the candace owen crowds crowd is gonna follow this

00:11:45.380 you know all the way down the rabbit hole and what that tells people is uh if you publicly stand up

00:11:52.640 against this we will destroy your life much like the people in the on the oj simpson uh jury they

00:11:59.400 find a perfectly obviously uh guilty person innocent uh because if they don't their lives

00:12:06.040 will be on the line they will be impacted and so the final conclusion has to be that any person

00:12:14.020 who speaks out against uh women killing their child for any reason is now persona non grata

00:12:20.660 in the United States. They are no longer capable

00:12:22.760 of leading a normal life. And that is

00:12:24.760 a horrific place to be, but that is

00:12:26.620 exactly where we are after, I think, this

00:12:28.560 scenario.

00:12:30.420 And that is

00:12:32.040 one of the last

00:12:34.800 few steps towards violence.

00:12:37.540 If you don't agree with

00:12:38.760 us, you will be totally disenfranchised.

00:12:42.200 And

00:12:42.720 everything you have will be taken away from you.

00:12:45.200 At which point you

00:12:46.820 say, well, now I have nothing to lose.

00:12:49.080 let's go for it this is this is where um republics terminate in civil war this is the pathway

00:12:57.840 essentially and um i don't want that i don't wish for that i wouldn't wish that wish that on anyone

00:13:06.900 uh but as an outsider as as an analyst this is where you are now um as somebody who comes from

00:13:16.520 a country who has experienced a civil war. This is not you speculating about something that you

00:13:21.680 have no clue about. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. When politics, you know, the word inclusion

00:13:31.820 is used horrifically by bad faith actors, but you want to leave some room in the political system

00:13:39.640 for your opponents. And what you see across the West is this concerted effort to make sure that

00:13:46.100 no dissident voices are tolerated now we just had a major hit on the reform party

00:13:53.700 where a bunch of foreign-funded journalists entrapped the leadership of reform and tried

00:14:01.200 to get them to got them to say that they would accept american money which is illegal and it

00:14:09.740 was a huge operation, targeted, planned. The whole state mobilized. Now the police is investigating

00:14:16.580 reform. They're trying to destroy it. They shouldn't have done what they did, but this was

00:14:21.120 clearly an op. In Germany, they're talking about banning the AFD party, which is the most popular

00:14:28.240 party in the polls right now and which might win its first federal election or a state-level

00:14:34.720 election, sorry, next week. In France, they tried to ban Le Pen from running. In Romania, they

00:14:43.200 basically rigged the election and forced it to be repeated. Where this doesn't happen, you end up in

00:14:51.600 Italy or in the United States, where the candidate for the dissidents ends up adopting the policies

00:14:58.640 of the establishment and this is a slow stripping away of democracy intended to

00:15:08.680 give people no choice and to fully exclude them from political life and when that happens well

00:15:16.460 okay violence and politics are on the same spectrum politics has failed now we go back to

00:15:22.980 the more primordial process well and the thing i particularly hate about this flashpoint

00:15:29.800 is it's a gender war aspect i hate this like i did it is so clear to me that the most disastrous

00:15:38.880 thing you can do is turn men and women into opposing voting blocs like there's just no

00:15:44.800 faster way to destroy your society uh now this was an argument made you know by a lot of uh

00:15:51.540 anti-suffragettes when the 19th amendment was proposed that the vote would tear families apart

00:15:56.760 it would tear men and women apart it would give them different political incentives they would 0.99

00:16:01.240 vote against each other this would you know disrupt families destroy family formation

00:16:05.120 and uh as it becomes more and more clear that the republican party is the male party and the

00:16:10.580 democratic party is the female and foreigners party um it's hard to do anything but state these

00:16:18.900 issues as if they are opposing political blocks but again like we have to figure out how to have

00:16:26.440 men and women get along we have to figure out how men and women can live together we have to be able

00:16:31.260 to form families to have civilizations to have a future and so even though there are many issues

00:16:37.280 that tear americans apart i think this is the most sinister because it starts to destroy marriage it

00:16:43.980 starts to destroy uh parents and children it starts to destroy you know the ability to date

00:16:49.020 like it makes it harder for people to have normal lives even if you aren't political even if you

00:16:53.980 don't care about politics at all you are now required to have the correct belief about lindsey

00:16:58.860 clancy and if you don't well then you're not allowed to have a wife or a girlfriend uh and 1.00

00:17:04.140 that's just the death of society right there i mean women's suffrage inserted politics into the

00:17:10.540 family and family life is entirely separate from political life and it comes from a liberal

00:17:19.180 misunderstanding the claim that the basic unit of society is the individual the basic unit of

00:17:25.260 society is the family not the individual and so the patriarch of the family gets to vote

00:17:32.780 everybody else gets to listen until they have their own families. And within married life,

00:17:41.340 the wife's politics are her husband's politics, 0.60

00:17:45.020 ideally because she isn't involved in politics to begin with.

00:17:47.980 that her heroism is in the home, the male's heroism is in society and in the home.

00:18:03.560 This inequality is real.

00:18:05.820 It's not an inequality in value.

00:18:08.260 It's not an inequality in love.

00:18:11.820 It merely means that men and women aren't identical.

00:18:17.980 Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what comes next. Hopefully there is a sane jury pool out there, but I'm not hopeful. I think that this case has had such a nationwide level of impact and notoriety that I don't think anyone who ends up on a jury is unaware of the consequences that will come if they find Lindsay Clancy guilty.

00:18:43.960 so i think that while this is a mistrial it's probably just a not guilty verdict waiting to

00:18:49.440 happen uh but that said um it's it's a dark moment for society um and i i fear that this

00:18:58.480 is not going to get any better um i think right yeah the incentives of democracy are not going to

00:19:06.160 allow us to solve this at all no no all right well after that incredibly encouraging discussion

00:19:13.020 let's head on to the iran war so um we're at this point that every opponent of the iran war told us

00:19:21.620 we would get to um there was a lot of you're not trusting the plan you're panicking you know you

00:19:28.580 don't understand uh you know of course donald trump knows more than you do about this don't 0.90

00:19:32.960 be ridiculous um and that has led us to the moment that was entirely predictable uh you know even

00:19:40.180 even the most planned trusting political pundits said we had to get out by june maybe july uh if

00:19:47.140 we had wanted to have any hope uh in the midterms you know get everything cleaned up make sure that

00:19:52.740 gas prices get back on track uh and then we will you know hopefully be able to rebound enough in

00:19:59.460 the midterms to retake or maintain control of congress now that it's very clear uh that there

00:20:07.780 is a real real bad turn coming through the midterms uh a lot of these very same pundits

00:20:14.560 who said don't worry you know we'll be done in a few months a few weeks a month months at most

00:20:19.460 um they are now preparing the blame game it's a lot of well of course every i've noticed two

00:20:26.740 things one it's a lot of well everyone knew that the iran war was a mistake there's a lot of there's

00:20:32.780 a lot of retroactive well yeah i mean obviously you know that didn't go well but now everybody's

00:20:38.500 admitted it it it reminds me of the covid attempt you know post covid there was that article saying

00:20:44.360 we need to forgive and forget uh the people who put you know the covid plan into action

00:20:49.140 there's there's this trying to close the barn door after the horse was well gone and say well

00:20:55.060 yes of course we all recognize the mistake but what are you going to do as if the iran war was

00:20:59.660 just you know some kind of act of nature it just kind of occurred out of nowhere uh like there

00:21:04.740 weren't people running around and trying to destroy anybody who noticed that this was going to be a

00:21:10.720 huge mistake that they weren't you know calling people traitors for recognizing what a disaster

00:21:15.340 this was going to be uh there's been a lot of this you're going to continue to see these people

00:21:19.280 but the other pivot is of course uh now saying that anybody who did notice this was going to

00:21:24.400 be a problem they're the reason midterms won't go well you know it's tucker carlson or it's

00:21:29.320 someone else. It's anybody who spoke up and said, you know what, I don't think this war is going to

00:21:33.740 go well. They're demoralizing the base. They're the reason that people aren't going to turn out.

00:21:38.840 Even though we've been mocking people for not being able to afford food, even though we've

00:21:43.120 been laughing at people for caring about the cost of living, even though we were threatening and

00:21:49.660 attacking and insulting everybody who was right about what happened here, they're the ones who

00:21:55.260 are at fault and so i think as we're heading into this moment it's probably time for us to stop at

00:22:01.920 the six-month anniversary of this war and assess where we are so uh the trump administration has

00:22:09.340 been cycling between deals and you know we're gonna we're on the edge of a deal now we're gonna

00:22:14.700 totally obliterate iran actually we're back to the drawing board with a deal actually we're gonna

00:22:19.360 completely dominate iran actually we're gonna make a deal actually uh we we've figured out 0.58

00:22:25.780 where all their stuff is and we're gonna be able to control them so what is the military reality

00:22:31.060 for the united states right now i don't think we're in any real danger of iran like blowing

00:22:36.380 up all of our ships but operationally what are the what's the likelihood of america being able

00:22:42.340 to continue even this low-grade level of conflict over let's say the next six months 0.83

00:22:48.240 Well, before I get into the military side of things, the only people who are happy with where things stand right now are the Israelis. 0.96

00:23:00.140 Of course, of course. 1.00

00:23:01.220 Nobody else has benefited from this.

00:23:03.600 Nobody in the States, nobody in Asia, nobody in the Middle East, nobody in Iran, definitely. 0.94

00:23:09.980 The only people who are happy with this are the Israelis.

00:23:12.740 And Netanyahu is doing interviews explaining how it was his effort and his commitment that actually finally got the Americans to go to this war. 0.59

00:23:23.460 And he's using that as part of his election campaign to explain essentially that the others couldn't have done what he's done. 0.84

00:23:42.740 And that should be said because this was a policy pushed by the Israelis. 0.73

00:24:00.120 And when they pushed this policy, they are clever enough to know that the regime wouldn't have fallen quickly, 0.95

00:24:08.360 that this wouldn't have been a quick war,

00:24:11.140 that there was no quick pathway to success

00:24:14.260 against a country that is literally built like a fortress

00:24:17.400 and has 90 plus million people.

00:24:20.700 But they pushed it anyway. 0.63

00:24:22.760 And they're using it in order to expand into Lebanon,

00:24:26.520 into Syria, and in the West Bank,

00:24:29.160 which is eventually going to lead to expansion into Jordan. 0.97

00:24:33.600 And at that point, that blows up the entire Middle East, 0.98

00:24:36.460 even more than it has blown up. 0.99

00:24:38.360 Where we are militarily, neither the Americans nor the Iranians are in a good place. 0.90

00:24:44.320 The Iranians are getting hit regularly and their capability is being somewhat degraded. 0.68

00:24:52.720 We can't tell what's true from what's information warfare, clearly, but it does seem that more

00:25:01.080 oil barrows are going through this rate of Hormuz than they were in the early days of

00:25:06.380 the conflict whether or not they're as much as the u.s government is saying is a different story

00:25:11.960 but the shipping in general for all kinds of other civilian goods through the gulf is doing

00:25:24.640 very badly and port activity throughout the region has fallen apart and the level of energy

00:25:32.260 reserves that are available is quickly diminishing. There seems to be consensus that the strategic

00:25:40.400 petroleum reserve is at the near bottom of how much can be taken out, but that is highly contested

00:25:48.460 and highly debated. It might well be that you can continue to draw from the strategic petroleum

00:25:55.100 Reserve for another few months. The Iranians are deterred to some extent. That's why they

00:26:04.900 aren't escalating massively. That's why they are trying to just hold the line for as much as they

00:26:11.160 can. They've successfully wrecked pretty much every American base in the region, with the exception

00:26:18.820 of one of the bases in the west of Saudi Arabia and the bases in Jordan. The rest are getting 0.67

00:26:24.840 regularly hammered and pounded and there is nothing that the u.s can do to stop that

00:26:30.680 um i think there's a lot more yeah can you can you say why there's nothing i one of the things

00:26:37.840 you have to explain to our audiences often yeah i think that the american military is just this

00:26:43.340 infinite machine that can do everything and go everywhere and has no logistical realities

00:26:48.540 it's and to be clear i know many people in the military doing an amazing job of the american

00:26:55.300 military is the most terrifying force on the world like that's all there is to it but that does not

00:27:01.080 mean it has infinite resources or infinite ability so it's often worth stopping to explain to american

00:27:06.540 audiences why the american military can't do something because whenever i have this discussion

00:27:10.360 with you know just a normal patriotic american they're like well why don't we just like hit a

00:27:15.020 button and blow everything up and solve this issue so why are they getting hit like this why is there

00:27:20.200 because they're out of interceptors because they're running out of interceptors and this

00:27:25.700 has largely come as a result of the use of interceptors in the ukraine war and then the

00:27:32.120 massive use of interceptors in the iran war and that has forced the american military to

00:27:37.900 be very selective in what it defends so if they think that a warehouse is being hit

00:27:43.520 they'll let the warehouse be hit. If it is soldiers who are probably going to get killed,

00:27:49.780 they will prioritize defending that. It doesn't mean that the American military is in a hopeless

00:27:55.700 position. If they were, the Iranians would be escalating. But the Americans can't stop the 1.00

00:28:01.180 Iranians from slowly dismantling the bases that they have in the region. And a lot of these have 1.00

00:28:06.060 been dismantled. So being forced to prioritize means that the bits of these bases that are

00:28:15.240 required for logistics and support and refueling and things like that are being less guarded than

00:28:23.120 other bits of these bases. And simply having soldiers there without logistics is pretty

00:28:30.800 pointless. So the Iranians don't have to kill every American soldier in the Middle East. 0.93

00:28:35.380 They just have to dismantle the logistics of the American bases in a way that prevents the U.S. from employing its troops effectively against Iran. 0.75

00:28:46.740 So that's why the Americans can't do anything about it right now. 0.98

00:28:51.060 The Iranians are not in a good position. 1.00

00:28:53.420 The Iranian Riyadh is falling apart.

00:28:56.080 I think it fell 10% in a matter of two days.

00:28:59.500 And over the last year or so, it went from a six, 700,000 riyals to the dollar to 2 million to the dollar.

00:29:11.400 That is a full-on collapse.

00:29:14.900 It might be 2,200,000.

00:29:18.780 That is a full-on collapse.

00:29:20.580 That is disastrous.

00:29:21.060 That's a Zimbabwe-style collapse of currency.

00:29:23.460 Yes.

00:29:24.100 Yes.

00:29:24.960 The ports of Iran are shut.

00:29:27.960 They've shut the ports of the Gulf.

00:29:29.720 Their own ports are shut.

00:29:31.660 This is a terrible situation for both of them.

00:29:35.260 And the reality is the Americans don't have a pathway to winning the war quickly. 0.89

00:29:40.980 The Iranians don't have a pathway to winning the war full stop. 0.98

00:29:45.240 They can't beat the United States. 0.99

00:29:47.120 What they're hoping to do is push the United States out of the region so that they can take over the Gulf. 0.96

00:29:52.560 But that leaves the Americans even more stuck, because if they simply leave, what happens essentially is that the Iranians can roll through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and end up dominating 20% of the world's energy. 0.94

00:30:09.400 And even if they don't militarily invade these countries, simply by saying every battle of oil you export will be taxed by us, that means total political submission. 0.93

00:30:23.000 And the Americans can't leave Iran in control of that much oil. 0.81

00:30:27.260 And they know that the minute the Americans slow down militarily, the Iranians will try to build a nuclear weapon. 0.64

00:30:35.580 They will expand their missile forces even more. 0.86

00:30:38.540 they will get ready for the next war. So what's happened is that every president since Obama

00:30:44.560 has been talking about some kind of pivot to Asia. And first through the Islamic State and 0.95

00:30:51.640 the Syria intervention and Libya, and then with Trump through the revocation of the JCPOA,

00:30:58.280 and with Biden more or less continuing with Trump's policies on Iran, and now Trump launching

00:31:04.160 the war, the US has

00:31:06.180 been absolutely stuck

00:31:07.760 in the quagmire that is 0.82

00:31:10.080 the Middle East. The public 1.00

00:31:11.940 wants one thing, get the hell out of the Middle 1.00

00:31:14.100 East. What gets delivered 1.00

00:31:15.780 every single time

00:31:17.480 is the exact opposite.

00:31:21.060 And

00:31:21.480 nobody can win this. 1.00

00:31:24.500 And this works for the Israelis 0.92

00:31:26.160 because it means that the Americans can't leave

00:31:28.160 the region.

00:31:30.480 Which is their biggest fear.

00:31:32.900 So I guess

00:31:34.160 let's start with the israelis here um because there's just no avoiding the fact that i think

00:31:40.720 you're correct that would this is israeli foreign policy being played out through the american

00:31:45.660 military you know this is their design this is what they want is there's a reason that you know

00:31:50.960 netanyahu goes around bragging about his ability to compel america to this because he understands

00:31:56.360 that's basically the goal of the israeli leadership is is yes figuring out that israel cannot survive

00:32:02.900 on its own it is it is the section eight housing of middle east uh uh countries like it does not

00:32:09.340 have the ability to sustain itself so the only option is to lobby the bigger government for

00:32:15.680 more power more funds now i know some israeli nationalists who for whom this problem is real

00:32:23.780 like they hate the idea that they're dependent on the united states even if they think they can

00:32:28.560 drive the united states reliably to do what they want they don't like the idea that they are

00:32:33.280 entirely having to do that and could not survive without it at the same time uh there seems to be 0.65

00:32:39.900 just no way forward for israel to take over you know their own defense as we've seen now uh with

00:32:48.780 the attempts through the american congress uh it seems that israel the israel lobby is trying to

00:32:53.980 move the ability of the president to deny Israel intelligence or military assets out of the hands

00:33:03.200 of the executive. They seem to want to make a kind of a permanent deep state lock on support of

00:33:09.620 Israel so that even when the I think was obviously the popular backlash against Israel, which will

00:33:16.380 pretty much make you toxic for supporting its long term project in the United States, both on

00:33:21.400 the right and the left when that eventually comes they'll have locked any actual democratic uh you

00:33:27.600 know oversight over foreign policy out of this decision um so that seems to be one part of the

00:33:34.140 plan but long term i mean does israel think this strategy is sustainable you're already talking

00:33:40.020 about them expanding into yet another front and i i mean even if you're the most uh kind of

00:33:46.800 jingoistic you know israeli leader if you really believe at the end of the day that you know you're

00:33:53.600 you guys can do anything and you're superior in every way it seems like at some point there is a

00:33:58.560 reality that just has to strike you that okay we're we're desperately having to compel compliance

00:34:04.480 from a foreign government to make this happen that we can't operate without and we're losing

00:34:08.800 the ability to compel that compliance how how can you continue to think that you're going to 0.98

00:34:14.500 expand your power beyond its own, what's already a crumbling, I think, infrastructure in the Middle

00:34:20.840 East, if you don't have that support? What is the theory of mine for the Israeli actions at this

00:34:27.400 point? Yeah, that's such a great question. And let me try to express that theory of mine as best as

00:34:36.280 I can. When you look at what David Ben-Gurion said, the founder or the father of Israel, shall we call

00:34:43.720 him. His view was very expansionist, very expansionist, insisted on he wanted to get

00:34:51.360 the lands beyond the Jordan River. He wanted to go further into the Golan, etc., etc. But he

00:34:57.960 understood the geopolitical reality around him. And he was more on the secular side of things.

00:35:07.080 If you look at Netanyahu, he is almost the last great secular leader of Israel.

00:35:15.300 What's happened slowly is that Israeli society has transformed the secular realists who existed in Israel,

00:35:23.360 who were expansionists, who wanted to get more territory, who wanted to gain influence,

00:35:29.600 but who were also realists to the extent that somebody like Menachem Begin,

00:35:35.080 who was literally an Irgun terrorist, was willing to give up Sinai to get peace.

00:35:45.020 That tradition is slowly being eroded. 0.72

00:35:49.120 And what it is being replaced with is religious Zionism.

00:35:54.420 And so you're hearing Israeli rabbis being much more open and honest

00:35:58.900 in their disdain for and contempt towards Christianity,

00:36:02.960 while at the same time insisting that this project is divinely supported

00:36:11.160 and will culminate in the creation of a greater Israel.

00:36:15.360 So instead of facing the reality of things,

00:36:20.120 what you're getting instead is a sort of divine will expression

00:36:30.000 or politics based on divinity, shall we say,

00:36:35.220 where the politicians firmly believe

00:36:37.880 that if they just are religious enough

00:36:41.180 and if they pursue the expansion

00:36:44.300 with enough dedication,

00:36:46.740 whatever turbulence that happens 0.99

00:36:48.780 will result in the coming of the Jewish, 0.73

00:36:52.520 of the rabbinic Jewish Messiah. 0.83

00:36:55.780 Now, let me ask you something here, though,

00:36:57.920 because i'm a little i'm a little skeptical of that this explanation only because we i kind of

00:37:03.500 heard this in america too i heard a lot of people echo this of well inside the united states military

00:37:09.880 it's all these wildly you know religious leaders it's these evangelicals with you know dispensational

00:37:17.800 visions of the return of christ you know saying that we have to go to war in iran because it will

00:37:22.840 ultimately bring about the end times and usher in the you know the the return of of christ and i i

00:37:29.520 just knew that wasn't true on a couple levels one because the united states military was full of

00:37:35.380 secular leaders like we were literally elevating people to general because they were trans uh just

00:37:40.840 a few years ago so the idea that the entire you know or the entire um officer corps had been

00:37:47.000 replaced by like religious zealots all of a sudden didn't seem to make sense and i look at israel and 0.80

00:37:52.540 Israel is literally like the gayest country in the world. 0.75

00:37:55.600 And I mean that in like the literal sense of they,

00:37:58.080 they have these huge celebrations for pride and everything. 0.99

00:38:00.600 They declare themselves the friendliest nation for homosexuality,

00:38:04.580 that kind of thing.

00:38:05.360 So the idea that their entire,

00:38:07.340 their entire reasoning here is deeply religious.

00:38:11.760 It just seems to clash with some of the beliefs that are extolled by the

00:38:15.060 population.

00:38:16.420 Oh no,

00:38:16.680 no.

00:38:16.900 I'm not saying that this is the entirety of the Israeli leadership.

00:38:20.640 I'm saying that, 0.52

00:38:22.540 And the religious Zionist factions in Israel seem to be operating purely on that principle.

00:38:33.060 So Smotrich today, an interview of his, Bezalel Smotrich, he's the finance minister.

00:38:39.380 He is part of the Religious Zionism Party.

00:38:43.980 This is a party that has a rabbinic council.

00:38:46.600 It's the rabbinic council that makes the decisions, and the politicians implement the decisions of the rabbinic council.

00:38:54.740 This guy essentially came out with an interview today basically attacking Christianity and saying that it's man-made and it's in whatever.

00:39:05.300 and this isn't something that you should be saying as an Israeli minister who depends on an

00:39:12.220 evangelical Zionist base in the United States for aid to your country to continue. But he now feels

00:39:19.820 confident enough to say it. The guys who are in the military are kind of stuck, and I'll give you

00:39:26.000 a small example of how stuck they are. Netanyahu is now sort of implying that the military was in

00:39:36.000 on 7 October, and they didn't wake him up until several hours after the attack had started.

00:39:43.840 And if they had, he would have immediately sent in the Air Force and prevented the attack from

00:39:48.320 being that atrocious. And the implication here is that the military was using this to try to

00:39:56.720 move him out of the way. Why would he say something like that? He's saying something like

00:40:02.740 that because there is a deep crisis within the secular camp in Israel. Within the secular camp

00:40:09.100 in Israel, they simply don't know what to do. The public supports more and more militaristic 0.95

00:40:15.880 solutions so if you look at the israeli public um they voted for rabin in the 90s he got the oslo

00:40:26.280 peace agreement he won another election he was assassinated perez couldn't win the election

00:40:35.000 and in order to win support what he did was launch a war in lebanon in 1996 in the hope that this

00:40:42.600 would demonstrate that he's a tough guy and win him the election. It failed, and that delivered

00:40:49.800 Netanyahu to his first cabinet. And Netanyahu tried his best to dismantle the peace agreement

00:40:55.980 with the Palestinians more or less successfully. Then the 99 elections happened, and the Israelis

00:41:02.020 vote for Ehud Barak, who wanted to go back to making peace with the Palestinians.

00:41:07.160 there is no candidate there in israel today who wants to make peace with anybody

00:41:13.220 if you listen to the nature of the debate in uh in israel it's over who has more military

00:41:21.400 credibility and a huge chunk of the parties are led by military men or former military men

00:41:28.400 especially the secular parties and their presentation to the public is look we will

00:41:34.920 be more effective on security than Netanyahu. And we will be even tougher than Netanyahu. And we

00:41:40.480 won't allow this kind of problem to emerge. Why do they have to pitch this? Because this is what

00:41:45.260 the public wants. I mean, when you say things for public consumption, the implication is that's

00:41:51.920 what the public wants you to tell them. And so the Israeli public has dramatically changed over

00:41:58.560 the last generation and become a lot more right-wing, the number of people who are aware

00:42:06.400 that there is a huge problem with the United States that can't be addressed by calling

00:42:12.840 everybody who disagrees with you an anti-Semite is a shrinking pool in Israel.

00:42:18.000 it's it's not it's by no means the majority and even if it is the secular parties are so divided

00:42:28.940 because the nature of the israeli political system that they can't mount an effective challenge

00:42:33.920 against netanyahu so they might win this election but there's no guarantee that they'll be able to

00:42:40.240 form a stable cabinet when netanyahu wasn't in power in israel they ended up having to have i

00:42:46.540 it was five elections in four years or four elections in three years or something like that

00:42:53.180 it was a period of immense instability when netanyahu wasn't there to oversee the system

00:43:00.460 and so and and the reason for that is because the israeli public wants everything to be more

00:43:09.420 and more militarized and this is at least coming from the changing demographics of israel

00:43:15.260 with the religious Zionists and the Hasids

00:43:18.860 becoming a bigger and bigger portion of Israeli society 1.00

00:43:25.560 to the extent that they can paralyze anybody who doesn't side with them.

00:43:31.520 Now, this relationship between Israel and the religious far-rightsha,

00:43:35.940 we call them, is pretty old.

00:43:38.460 You have videos of Begin and of Rabin and of Perez

00:43:42.420 and of every senior Israeli politician, praising the Lubavitcher Rebbe and saying what a wonderful 0.82

00:43:50.620 man he was, when in reality he was in many ways a great man, but also an extremist lunatic who

00:43:58.260 opposed any kind of concession towards the Palestinians, towards any Arabs, and was adamant 0.94

00:44:04.620 that whenever one Jew is killed, there has to be an insane reaction, rather some kind of

00:44:12.400 rather than some kind of political process

00:44:14.320 to stop people murdering each other.

00:44:18.220 So this tendency is old, 0.88

00:44:20.760 and it is not something that the Israelis

00:44:24.520 are very inquisitive about.

00:44:30.740 In the West, whenever you express

00:44:35.620 the mildest nationalist sentiment,

00:44:38.320 you're called a white supremacist,

00:44:39.940 far right, hard right, this, that, or the other, and there are serious discussions about banning

00:44:44.880 your political party, and the state fully activates against you. Israel isn't like that.

00:44:50.680 They don't have this loss of confidence.

00:45:09.940 September 4th to Wednesday, September 9th. And they think that they can keep on getting

00:45:20.760 the Americans to do their bidding more or less indefinitely. And if you worry about it too much,

00:45:26.640 you're seen as a bit of a traitor. Well, to be fair, we just saw the Republicans in the House

00:45:34.400 pass a bill to defund universities that are not sufficiently loyal to israel um now to be clear 0.92

00:45:43.320 i'm pro defunding universities for pretty much any reason uh i think that they are a scourge

00:45:50.000 on the earth and that we should seize the endowments and uh and just you know sell off

00:45:54.640 the buildings and salt the earth uh but that said i can't help but notice that we didn't

00:45:59.580 do this when universities were discriminating against white people uh when they were running

00:46:04.780 blm marches when they were pushing for vaccine mandates when they were saying western civilization 0.52

00:46:10.380 had to be destroyed when they're saying that christianity was evil uh when they were pushing

00:46:14.860 for the destruction of capitalism uh in all those moments we did we the cash continued to flow

00:46:21.580 it's only when universities started to say they don't like israel that all of a sudden this

00:46:26.540 happened and so you know it might not be true that american politics is entirely dictated by

00:46:32.400 israel but you can see why people get that impression you can you can understand why

00:46:36.940 people believe that israel has uh the level of control that is often uh floated out there and

00:46:43.380 so this really puts us in a strange scenario because obviously uh you know once again i wish

00:46:49.960 i never had to discuss israel i wish i never had to reference that country in the middle east

00:46:54.820 even one time uh but the fact that my entire uh midterm elections are about to be dictated by the

00:47:01.620 fact that we couldn't stop ourselves from yet again going to war on their behalf and driving up

00:47:06.320 gas prices right before a midterm election um that that the the fact that we are now staring

00:47:13.100 uh a what could be a very rocky bond market situation down uh because of uh the iran war

00:47:20.900 the fact that the trump administration is desperately trying to bail out our economy

00:47:24.420 in one move with the bond market while threatening to cut people out of the dollar system if they in

00:47:32.420 any way shape or form do business with iran basically saying yes we understand that you

00:47:38.240 know our reserve currency is the key to the operation of our entire empire but we are willing

00:47:42.760 to put it on the line over and over again so we can achieve a goal israel wants like this is just 0.82

00:47:49.900 madness it's it's madness and so i can't stop talking about this because literally the future

00:47:54.200 of my country depends on it and so is there a possibility that with uh the republicans realizing

00:48:02.140 that well midterms are just cooked anyway like you're not going to win that the the decision

00:48:07.280 then is just to lean in right to just say well screw it you know we already paid the price for

00:48:12.620 the iran war so we might as well stay we might as well escalate we might as well go as hard as we

00:48:17.120 can, or just leave it there in this indecisive kind of state because, well, we've already

00:48:24.460 paid the cost and there is no additional political equity to be lost because we already

00:48:30.100 gambled it all away.

00:48:31.940 Well, look, for the maintenance of the empire as it currently stands, you need the dollar

00:48:40.960 as a reserve currency, that requires twin deficits in trade and in the fiscal sphere.

00:48:50.160 You must have a budget deficit and you must have a trade deficit for you to continue to operate

00:48:55.140 the dollar system. This is fundamentally at odds with any kind of national principle,

00:49:01.680 with the idea that the purpose of the government of the United States is to serve the people of

00:49:07.480 the United States. Rather, it seems that the purpose of the government of the United States

00:49:12.820 is to serve the oligarchy. And in a debt-based economy, the oligarchy will always end up being

00:49:21.660 the usurers and the financial institutions and the moneylenders. And so this is a stark reality

00:49:31.480 here. The U.S. is doing its best to save the bond market, but Britain and Japan are about to cook

00:49:39.780 off completely. Japanese bond yields are at 30-year highs. British bond yields have come down

00:49:48.520 from 28-year highs to be just 19-year highs. And that is seen as somehow as a success for reasons

00:50:01.100 that I don't understand, but here in Britain, the government is insane and incompetent and 0.98

00:50:07.880 deficient in every single way. They might end up crashing the economy of their own accord. 0.77

00:50:14.520 And if you look at the global system, the Japanese are on the brink, the Europeans are on the brink, 0.92

00:50:22.880 and minus Germany, but that's slowly being corrected with much more borrowing for the 0.58

00:50:28.860 sake of Ukraine, and the British are on the brink. And so you're staring at a crisis that makes the

00:50:36.380 global financial crisis look very tame. And then, is there a bubble in AI? Isn't there a bubble in AI?

00:50:44.660 Odds are there is, because every single asset class has had its prices massively inflated.

00:50:50.980 and if these things go off at the same time it's genuinely disastrous and for this to happen at a

00:51:01.400 time when russian energy exports are falling and middle east energy exports are falling

00:51:07.500 well that's a total disaster besant is now saying that in two years time the strait of

00:51:14.680 will be irrelevant because there will be bypass pathways now there's a couple of things here

00:51:20.160 First, the fact that the responsibility for defeating Iran was transferred from Hegseth to Besant

00:51:28.080 is itself a strong indicator of the extent of the failure of the American military against Iran. 1.00

00:51:36.640 Again, I'm not saying that the Iranians are in a good position. 0.85

00:51:40.680 And I'm not saying that they can outright defeat the United States. 0.85

00:51:44.140 But if things were going well militarily, Besant wouldn't have to get involved.

00:51:47.760 that's one thing

00:51:50.520 second when he says in two years

00:51:53.360 Hormuz will be irrelevant

00:51:54.400 what he is effectively saying

00:51:57.520 is that the Americans

00:51:59.300 don't have a way of opening 0.67

00:52:01.440 Hormuz

00:52:01.900 there is no way for them to achieve this

00:52:05.140 military

00:52:05.540 third this is simply not true

00:52:08.620 because the Iranians

00:52:11.600 can strike at the Suez Canal 1.00

00:52:13.200 from Lebanon which we've seen them 0.99

00:52:15.360 kind of do they hit Damieta 0.97

00:52:17.400 which is close to the Suez and they can strike at Saudi oil exports out of the Red Sea

00:52:23.940 and the Saudis will never be reckless enough to allow their pipelines to terminate in Israel

00:52:28.980 and even if they did their pumping stations can be blown up by Iran and by the Yemenis. 0.67

00:52:36.920 The last thing which I found interesting is this idea of investing 100 billion dollars in Venezuela

00:52:42.220 and transferring control of huge chunks of Venezuelan reserves to the United States

00:52:46.840 and essentially establishing a colonial enterprise in Venezuela

00:52:55.080 to extract Venezuelan oil.

00:52:58.080 The marginal cost of a Venezuelan barrel is $50 to $60 maybe,

00:53:06.120 all things considered when you look at the size of investment

00:53:09.080 and so on and so forth.

00:53:10.620 And it really doesn't make sense to invest in Venezuela

00:53:14.560 if there is enough oil coming out of the Middle East.

00:53:18.380 This is an investment that is implicitly betting

00:53:21.280 on a lot more damage to energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

00:53:26.040 That's the implied bet in the Venezuela decision.

00:53:30.580 And it's going to take years and years and years

00:53:32.540 to develop that as well in energy resources

00:53:34.460 to a level that is comparable to what's coming out of the Middle East.

00:53:38.920 This isn't going to happen overnight.

00:53:40.360 Oh, this may suit some oligarchs, but over the time needed before Venezuela is actually operational enough and this investment is actually paying off properly, you could end up in a global financial crisis that completely changes everything politically.

00:54:02.100 that's true and i think that obviously uh there was a much better way to execute this

00:54:09.720 to not put yourself in this stressful situation but i do support making that switch ultimately

00:54:15.660 the less reliant the united states is on the middle east the less they have to involve

00:54:20.500 themselves in the politics of the middle east the less they need to be there militarily so

00:54:24.440 uh you should have done this without an invasion of iran you should have just done the you know

00:54:29.300 done the venezuelan investment and then made the slow transfer over uh but obviously uh this puts

00:54:35.860 a lot of stress on uh that project uh in a way that it's very dangerous uh but i do i do think

00:54:42.000 overall it's the right move to to make that shift that said yeah um it is an interesting

00:54:47.440 scenario you you face here with the with the global economic crisis because you know obviously

00:54:54.980 we saw what the elites did to all of our economies out of covid so much of this is all downhill from

00:55:01.100 covid you know we printed all that money during the lockdowns we wrecked the economy we disrupted

00:55:06.440 trade uh you know all kinds of systems it turns out that you can't just shut an economy off and

00:55:11.800 then turn it back on again it's not a computer uh you you don't just hit the reset button and it's

00:55:17.120 a delicate global system so obviously we saw the damage from that and i i remember writing a a piece

00:55:23.080 of the time that went really big uh because um we then immediately went into the war in ukraine

00:55:29.040 another uh devastating economic decision that had all kinds of ramifications joe biden famously

00:55:35.960 went out and said we're gonna you know destroy russia economically in two months and they'll

00:55:40.400 they'll just be bankrupt and we won't have to actually fight a war uh instead uh you know the

00:55:45.020 russians were able to cut off all these supply lines yeah disruption of fertilizer and food and

00:55:50.460 fuel and everything else coming out of ukraine and and russia another shock and then we go back

00:55:56.980 into iran doing the exact same thing uh you know we built a entire empire empire on the liberal

00:56:05.100 exchange of global uh uh assets and we put ourselves in a scenario where then we were

00:56:12.000 going to cut down cut off one two three you know three huge moves the flow of those assets

00:56:19.360 making sure that all of these things we had made ourselves entirely dependent on

00:56:23.880 were no longer accessible.

00:56:26.160 And so it was just amazing to watch this roll out

00:56:29.580 because the elites built this system.

00:56:32.140 They know that they've made the empire entirely dependent

00:56:36.480 on this global trade system, the flow of commodities, all of these things.

00:56:41.740 And then they decided to try to use that power

00:56:45.540 to like force these other countries to do what they want uh you know they tried to use the soft

00:56:51.840 power of the economy and manipulation everything else to to operate the empire as the foxes often

00:56:57.540 do but they've obviously stressed the system so far that it can no longer exercise control you can

00:57:04.480 let the system run or you can use it to control compel other countries to do what you want you

00:57:10.140 can't do both right now it's too damaged the economy's too damaged right it's like it's like

00:57:14.860 a body you know maybe maybe you could fight off a cold if you didn't already have cancer but you've

00:57:19.700 had cancer and chemo and so now the cold will kill you if you contract it and it seems that we're

00:57:25.020 ignoring this reality when it comes to the uh global economic system because we still want to

00:57:31.120 run around exerting you know globalist control over every government in the world uh not recognizing

00:57:36.840 we've made the empire so sick that any disruption in the flow of trade money anything else will

00:57:43.060 completely leave you in a very serious position look i i too struggle to understand this

00:57:52.780 incompetence and i am inclined to explain it with hubris yeah and so i'm willing to float a couple of

00:58:02.300 wacky theories here and maybe i'm right maybe i'm wrong but i'm just i wanted to test this

00:58:11.000 with someone and think this out loud with someone and you know let me try that with you

00:58:16.180 the system when you use the word system and elites there are two things here there's the

00:58:26.580 political system which is a bit of an irrelevance it is decorative there's the actual system which

00:58:33.220 is the oligarchy partnered with the pentagon and if you wanted to get the oligarchy to

00:58:41.880 obey the pentagon and separate from china the only way to do that is through massive warfare

00:58:50.480 the only way to achieve that is through warfare if you want to cut your dependence and weaken the 0.93

00:58:58.900 Chinese, you need to hit Russian energy and hit Gulf energy and hit Russian food production 0.86

00:59:05.440 and weaken China's ability to rely on a country like Russia. This seems to have backfired with 0.74

00:59:15.880 the Chinese and the Russians investing jointly, and they haven't been able to do that much

00:59:20.840 damage to Russia, but they're trying. With the Middle East, they've succeeded in reducing the 0.51

00:59:27.820 flow of oil dramatically and it's hurting mainly the Asian countries and Europe. And if you weaken

00:59:36.600 Europe, you get to consolidate over Europe more effectively. And now we're seeing this wave of

00:59:43.020 consolidation over Latin America, which is China's biggest food and natural resource supplier

00:59:49.880 with some stuff coming out of the Congo like lithium, but the bulk of the materials that

00:59:56.940 goes to China is coming from Latin America, Russia, and the Middle East. And so if you try

01:00:03.240 to weaken these three suppliers to the Chinese, that might be the only way that you could convince

01:00:10.020 oligarchs that are currently based in the West to invest in the West and to develop productive

01:00:16.080 capacity in the West in line with what the Pentagon thinks that it needs. This might be it, 1.00

01:00:21.580 I don't know. But in doing so, they are risking blowing up the financial system.

01:00:28.540 And they all depend on that system. And this seems to be a real priority and a real pain point.

01:00:35.860 You see Trump changing his tune when interest rates hit 5.3%, when oil prices go above 100,

01:00:43.000 etc. That seems to be a real factor, trying to preserve the financial system as long as possible.

01:00:47.660 Do they succeed in this bid to sort of isolate China and weaken it?

01:00:53.680 Or does it spectacularly backfire against them?

01:00:57.980 I don't know.

01:00:59.480 The big advantage that the United States has is that it can blockade Chinese ports to a large degree without going anywhere near China.

01:01:08.760 that it can rely on Indonesia and the Strait of Malacca 0.62

01:01:14.340 and the Cape of Good Hope and the Falklands and the Panama Canal 0.99

01:01:20.520 in order to slowly try to choke off the Chinese. 1.00

01:01:25.420 Is this the great ambition that they're playing at? 0.99

01:01:29.700 Is this the big, grand strategy that they're playing at?

01:01:33.420 I don't know.

01:01:35.600 But everything that they're doing seems to be insane. 0.67

01:01:38.760 And you can't assume that they're trying to do something in service of the West, while at the same time, every single domestic policy in the West is aimed at destroying the family, the individual, Christianity, individual liberty, and to overwhelm the West with foreigners. 0.87

01:01:58.500 So, you know, you can express these ideas, oh, maybe there's a big grand plan and this is all part of a huge strategy to screw over the Chinese. 0.99

01:02:08.760 Then why, when I walk in every British town, it's infested, infested is the correct word, with gambling shops, foreigners, and complete and total decay and drugs. 1.00

01:02:27.660 So if this is some kind of big plan that they have to sort of revitalize the West by weakening China, why are you actively destroying the West? 1.00

01:02:38.760 Like, there doesn't seem to be a coherent, if the West was governed by its worst enemies, what exactly would be different? 0.80

01:02:50.740 What would look different?

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01:03:16.860 Yeah, I think they see it more as warring economic zones than warring countries.

01:03:26.040 They don't care about the quality of the people inside the economic zone

01:03:31.320 as long as the economic zone continues to operate.

01:03:34.920 and so i don't think they see the degradation of the population as a problem i think they see it

01:03:41.660 as a way to consolidate power uh as i've you know pointed out many times the the high and low versus

01:03:48.180 the middle right the only people who are going to push back against the uh oligarchic class are

01:03:53.520 going to be the middle class who are invested in the future of the country who you know own property

01:03:59.020 who have the capability of participating in politics in a real way right and so they need 1.00

01:04:05.560 to hollow that out you you always have to get rid of the kulaks right then that that's the key 1.00

01:04:09.460 and so if you bring in a bunch of foreigners uh then you have the ability to basically terrify 1.00

01:04:16.720 the population into compliance the foreigners are going to be entirely indebted to you because they 0.96

01:04:21.420 wouldn't be here otherwise and they can't earn their own living you can promise them that you'll 1.00

01:04:25.680 steal from the middle class and hand it to them uh and so you use them to leverage it out that's

01:04:30.680 what ai is planning to do that's what flock cameras are for they're not for criminals they're for you

01:04:36.740 to make sure that you can't push back against you know this plan uh and that's why every country in

01:04:42.940 the west is racing towards this technology uh because i think they recognize that this is the

01:04:47.940 only way they can overcome uh kind of the the degradation of the population that they've created

01:04:53.980 This is how you manage people at scale in the future is through algorithms, through constant surveillance, through through manipulation of social media and and media.

01:05:07.360 And so I think that's that's the plan is is they don't really care what the contents of the country is.

01:05:13.400 The country is a resource to be managed. And so it doesn't matter who's there.

01:05:17.320 It doesn't matter if you're continuing a way of life. You don't actually care about the well-being of the population.

01:05:21.760 uh they're you're they're literally just human batteries in the matrix uh that you're you know 0.75

01:05:26.600 you're farming uh and so who cares if that is a third world or or you know a native englishman

01:05:31.940 or a native american it doesn't matter right ultimately uh they all generate the same biomass

01:05:37.120 and so as long as you have the tools to to hoard the bio to herd the bio heard the biomass around

01:05:43.760 then it doesn't matter you know who's in the pot uh and so i think that's that that's the real uh

01:05:49.940 look out there um but once again i see we've come to a uh positive and uh uplifting conclusion

01:05:56.160 uh lots lots of uh white pills uh distributed out there but um in all seriousness i as as

01:06:02.880 difficult as that analysis is i have no way to argue with it and so i won't bother uh because

01:06:09.120 i think it's accurate and we have to be able to face the realities here um but that said

01:06:15.400 You do a lot of great work with the Lotus Eaters.

01:06:18.660 If people want to find your work, where should they be looking? 0.97

01:06:23.520 Oh, thanks again for having me.

01:06:25.840 I enjoy these conversations, even though they are depressing and always wonderful to speak to you.

01:06:34.920 You can find me on the lotus eaters.com.

01:06:38.160 You can find me on modadgeopolitics.com.

01:06:41.220 And you can also find me on X at Firas Modad.

01:06:44.560 um thank you absolutely thanks for coming on and let's take a look at the questions from

01:06:51.420 the people here real quick we have lowbrow says uh so glad to see for us back on not only is he

01:06:57.420 highly erudite but he has firsthand experience of what it looks like when a when countries come

01:07:02.420 apart at the seams as a south african i can empathize yeah i mean even i look at south

01:07:11.060 africa and go thank god lebanon isn't that bad when when you have a leban when you have a lebanese

01:07:17.800 man looking at your country and saying oh well at least we're not there it's like well yeah yeah 0.93

01:07:24.120 at least we're not in that situation um antebellum says uh do you believe the ideal foreign policy

01:07:32.960 for america is full monroe doctrine pull back to uh usa withdraw from asia nato and middle uh

01:07:42.640 mid east i do uh yeah i mean i think it's very clear that you need a near abroad strategy i think

01:07:48.580 that the idea of maintaining a global uh empire is waning uh that this is what a lot of people

01:07:56.740 have talked about multipolarity what is likely coming is that it's just too hard uh to continually

01:08:03.060 maintain that global liberal empire and so moving forward you obviously need some way to adjust uh

01:08:10.280 you know you have to find uh i think some people are calling it uh ally shoring uh industries and

01:08:16.780 and resources even if you are not directly returning the manufacturing or the resource

01:08:22.140 production to your country at the very least ensuring that you are only reliant on stable

01:08:28.080 allies uh which is what you should have been doing anyway it's insane that we told ourselves 0.73

01:08:32.540 we could ever do anything else uh bring china to the wto huzzah right but like this is why even

01:08:39.380 though you know i'm not like hot on the uh uh the the venezuela move at the very least it it's

01:08:45.860 justifiable in a way i can see how it benefits my country it's not me just going why are we here

01:08:51.860 What are we doing? Like, I at least see the logic in that. And I am far more tolerant of some level of interventionism in our backyard with countries next to us rather than trying to sustain things across the world.

01:09:05.220 So, yeah, I think that ultimately that makes far more sense.

01:09:10.340 I agree with that completely.

01:09:11.960 Yeah. And then Latrita Bidet says Persia sits upon a rare fulcrum in history and few grasp how far they'll push to to right past wrongs in game.

01:09:25.440 GCC stops buying U.S. Treasuries. R.I.P. Israel.

01:09:30.500 Yeah, I mean, I don't know how focused a strategy Iran can really have at this point.

01:09:38.600 As Faraz pointed out, they're not in the best place at the moment.

01:09:42.140 It's not like they've handily won anything here.

01:09:44.580 Great damage has been done to that country and its stability.

01:09:48.040 And so I wouldn't expect them to make any incredible moves along this line.

01:09:54.180 But it is very clear that they were not the pushover that many people expected them to be.

01:10:00.200 It was a real country, a real civilization with a real fault line when it comes to critical energy resources, that kind of thing.

01:10:07.840 And so they were able to extract a lot more of a cost than most people expected.

01:10:12.900 Just one thing to add here.

01:10:15.520 What's really changed during the war is this new Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani alliance.

01:10:21.820 It's still nascent.

01:10:23.540 It's still not fully fledged.

01:10:25.320 It's not having an impact tomorrow morning. 0.98

01:10:30.920 But over time, this joining together of Sunni states is going to change the world. 1.00

01:10:37.840 And it is going to mean that the threat from Islam that existed in the Middle Ages 1.00

01:10:43.840 is fully back on. And that's what people are missing. Iran is a natural ally of the West here 0.91

01:10:53.280 because it's sandwiched between these crazy Sunni powers. And instead of respecting that, 1.00

01:11:00.440 we are having the west's resources wasted in this entirely pointless war that cannot be won

01:11:09.360 and that if it is won wouldn't help the west it would help the west's enemies 0.81

01:11:14.420 the sydneys all right guys we're gonna go ahead and wrap things up here but once again for us

01:11:20.960 thank you so much for coming on everybody should absolutely be checking out his content over with

01:11:26.340 the Lotus Eaters. And if it's your first time on this channel, you need to subscribe, click the

01:11:30.560 bell, notifications, all that stuff so you know when we go live. If you want to get these broadcasts

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01:11:39.060 And when you do, leave a rating or review. It really helps with the algorithm magic. Thank you

01:11:42.920 everybody for watching. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - September 04, 2026

The Iran War Turns 6 Months Old ｜ Guest： Firas Modad ｜ 9⧸4⧸26

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