The attempts to take down Donald Trump are very, very real, and are having significant consequences for the body politic. They are coming from nearly every major institution in the U.S., from our universities to the media, from academia to the judiciary, it s happening everywhere. And the real question is: why? Is this really about Donald Trump as a person, or is it about something broader? That the elite institutions in our society have decided that if anyone remotely rightwing were to ever enter the presidency again, it would be an existential threat to their vision of a utopian future for the United States? And the answer to that question may surprise you: it s not about Trump. It s about the right wing, and their hatred of anyone who smacks in any way of being on the right in the USA. And Trump is just the apotheosis of all the things they hate: he s just the apex of all that they hate, and he s also the epitome of everything they hate about Republicans. And that s why they don t just hate Trump, they hate him - they hate every Republican who smears him as a racist, sexist, misogynist, and xenophobe they can think of. And they want to destroy him, because they think he s going to bring down their ideal of a president. And they think that s what they need to do to stop Donald Trump from ever becoming president at all, and they can t live up to what they ve built in their minds of a person who s supposed to be good and good and great and good, no matter what he s actually good and bad and they think they re going to be better than that. This episode is brought to you by Fact, a podcast produced by the excellent folks at Fact, and edited by Sarah Abdurrahman, and the wonderful folks at the website Fact, Inc., and the excellent people at Fact. They do all of that. Thank you, Sarah, for making this podcasting machine, and thanks for listening to this podcast, again and again, again, for your support, and thank you for listening, and for supporting us, and we appreciate it, and good vibes, and your feedback, and all of your support and good reviews, and you're listening, good days, and yay, bye, bye bye bye, good bye. - MRS. -- THE PODCAST IS OUT! -- -- -- - - -- Thank You, SONGS
00:00:00.000Well, folks, the attempts to take down Donald Trump are very, very real, and they are having significant consequences for the body politic.
00:00:06.000They're coming from nearly every major institution in the United States, from our universities to the media, from academia to the judiciary, as we'll talk about.
00:00:27.000I will contend that it's about something broader.
00:00:29.000That the elite institutions in our society have basically decided that if anyone remotely right-wing were to ever enter the presidency again, it would be an existential threat to their vision of a utopian future for the United States.
00:00:40.000The reason I say this is because this weekend marked President's Day.
00:00:43.000We have an entire episode of FACT up at YouTube that you can view right now about the worst president of all time.
00:00:50.000And what you'll see in our list is that it goes all the way back and all the way forward, and it really tries to take a look at what people did while they were president, and the impact of those things while they were president, and sometimes, as with Jimmy Carter, in their post-presidency.
00:01:02.000But, historians every year, there's always a big story, about the presidential rankings, the overall presidential greatness rankings from the American Political Science Association.
00:01:12.000And what this list does is it demonstrates who they think was the best and who they think was the worst.
00:01:17.000Obviously they have Trump in last place.
00:01:21.000But that doesn't really answer the question as to whether they just hate Trump or whether there is something broader going on.
00:01:26.000To truly understand how much the elite institutions Hate Trump and really hate the right wing.
00:01:31.000You have to understand that it's not just that they hate Trump, is that they despise anyone who smacks in any way of being on the right in the United States.
00:01:39.000And Trump is just the apotheosis of all of those things.
00:01:42.000He's just the apex of all the things that they hate because they are able to stack up all of those myriad crazinesses and foibles of Donald Trump on top of all the other things that they hate about Republicans.
00:01:52.000So if you look at their list, Their list is stacked top to bottom with Democrats.
00:01:58.000Every Republican is downgraded significantly.
00:02:00.000Every Democrat is upgraded significantly.
00:02:03.000So here is the list from the American Political Science Association of their top presidents.
00:02:09.000They have Abraham Lincoln at number one, obviously consensus number one pick.
00:02:12.000Now, usual consensus pick is Abraham Lincoln number one and George Washington number two.
00:02:16.000Sometimes you see it the other way, George Washington number one and Abraham Lincoln number two, but those are always the top two, but not for the American Political Science Association.
00:02:24.000They have Lincoln at number one, and then they have Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two.
00:02:28.000Which is pretty astonishing considering that Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over the Great Depression.
00:02:33.000He probably lengthened it by nearly a decade with his garbage economic policies.
00:02:37.000Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated many of the vast government overspending programs that have crippled America and created a vast welfare state that has led to a $34 trillion national debt.
00:02:51.000In other words, there are some good things that FDR did.
00:02:54.000Like, for example, his leadership during World War II, even that was plagued by some bad leadership decisions, particularly with regard to, say, the Yalta Agreement, which ceded all of Eastern Europe to the Soviets.
00:03:04.000FDR had a bizarre soft spot for Stalin.
00:03:07.000In any case, putting him number two above George Washington is the tell, but it doesn't end there.
00:03:11.000They put Teddy Roosevelt at number four.
00:03:13.000Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was a progressive.
00:03:15.000Teddy Roosevelt was a believer in the power of big government, even though he was a Republican.
00:03:20.000And the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted identity somewhat over the course of time.
00:03:23.000They put Thomas Jefferson at number 5, Harry Truman at number 6, and Barack Obama at number 7.
00:03:29.000There is no possible way to say that Barack Obama is the 7th best president of all time.
00:03:36.000The 7th greatest president of all time.
00:03:37.000Clocking in above Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Madison, John Adams, Ronald Reagan, and everyone else.
00:04:02.000And domestically, he polarized America like no president of my lifetime, bar none.
00:04:08.000Not just on issues of race, but also on issues of culture, on issues of, say, sexual mores.
00:04:14.000We moved from a country where in 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a proponent of traditional marriage to, by the time he left office, open discussions about whether men are women.
00:04:24.000That is what Barack Obama did, besides presiding over the worst recovery from a serious economic recession in American history, the slowest recovery in American history.
00:04:33.000And he spent more money than literally all prior presidents combined, did Barack Obama.
00:04:37.000They have him at number 7 on this list.
00:04:39.000And then, they have LBJ, who initiated the Great Society programs, that have spent probably 13 trillion dollars on anti-poverty programs to leave almost precisely the same percentage of Americans in poverty.
00:05:16.000So Ronald Reagan led the most booming economic recovery In modern American history in the 1980s and also created the groundwork for defeating the Soviet Union.
00:05:29.000That guy is ranked at number 16 and Joe Biden is ranked at number 14 by these people.
00:05:33.000Woodrow Wilson, the worst president of all time, a vicious racist who led us into World War One, who then created the system that led us into World War Two, who jailed his political opponents for sedition.
00:05:44.000Woodrow Wilson, a truly horrifying, who created the bureaucratic state, the worst president of all time.
00:05:49.000They have that guy ranked above Ronald Reagan.
00:05:52.000Okay, the reason that I'm reading this is because you have to understand the framework by which our elite institutions work.
00:05:58.000And because of that framework, they're led into both a bizarre delusion that they can't possibly lose to somebody like Donald Trump.
00:06:05.000And also, they're led to believe that they can do anything they want to stop Donald Trump.
00:06:09.000Because after all, if you have the 14th greatest president of all time, according to these people, running against literally the worst president of all time, Well, I mean, what can't you do to stop that President of the United States?
00:06:22.000What can't you do to stop Donald Trump?
00:06:24.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:06:26.000First, do you know what big tech and big government have in common?
00:06:28.000They both would like to silence dissenting voices into submission.
00:06:31.000If you talk about something they don't like on social media, well, good chance your post will be flagged by a content moderator.
00:06:36.000You might end up on some sort of government watch list.
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00:06:43.000The problem with Big Tech is that not only do they attempt to censor you, they also track what you do online.
00:06:47.000They track what you're searching for, the videos you watch, everything you click.
00:06:51.000They can then match your activity to your true identity using your device's unique IP address.
00:06:55.000When I use ExpressVPN, they can't see my IP address at all.
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00:07:00.000Plus, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of my internet data for protection from hackers and eavesdroppers.
00:07:06.000ExpressVPN is by far the best VPN I've tried.
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00:07:15.000The app has one button, you tap it, you're protected, it's that simple.
00:07:17.000So, stop letting your voice be censored, defend your rights and protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash ben.
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00:07:30.000So in the realm of delusion, Nate Silver has been taking it directly on the chin over the weekend because the poll analyst put up a piece pointing out that Joe Biden is extremely vulnerable in his re-elect effort.
00:07:42.000He says, quote, If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have told you that Joe Biden was a reasonably clear favorite in the event of a rematch against Donald Trump.
00:07:48.000Not an overwhelming favorite, mind you, but perhaps a 65-35 favorite.
00:07:53.000The case for Biden seemed obvious enough.
00:07:54.000Incumbents win reelection more often than not.
00:07:56.000And of course, Biden beat Trump in 2020.
00:07:58.000Democrats were coming off a relatively strong midterm.
00:08:00.000So I don't begrudge people who took their time to realize that Biden's reelection would be a heavy lift.
00:08:05.000The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden's approval numbers remained poor, even as the economy was improving.
00:08:10.000And it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age was an enormous problem for voters and one Democrats weren't going to be able to spin away.
00:08:18.000Since then, Biden's situation has become considerably worse.
00:08:20.000If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65-35 favorite, says Nate Silver.
00:08:24.000But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably now the underdog.
00:08:29.000And he says you guys need to stop being delusional.
00:08:32.000And he goes through the stats and he points out that Joe Biden has a real problem in his re-elect effort, which is why you are seeing people ranging from Nate Silver to Ezra Klein, neither of whom is exactly a Republican, calling for Joe Biden to step aside.
00:08:45.000And he's getting walloped by the left today because it is not possible for Joe Biden to lose.
00:09:20.000It was the same experience that my colleagues had who met with him for hours, Democrats and Republicans, about the Mideast only a few weeks ago.
00:09:28.000So he's totally fine, according to Amy Klobuchar, and they're going to continue to maintain this because, again, if you believe that Joe Biden is the 14th greatest president of all time and that Barack Obama was number seven, then how is it possible for Joe Biden to lose to Donald Trump?
00:09:42.000But Team Biden does realize that there are some bad polling numbers for him, and so he is now going to try to pull off a reset, according to Axios.
00:09:49.000They see his State of the Union address as a big public reset moment, so good luck with that.
00:09:53.000I've seen a lot of State of the Unions over my time watching politics, which is several decades at this point.
00:09:59.000And let me just say, there has never been a State of the Union that acted as an actual reset for a president.
00:10:04.000There have been good ones and there have been bad ones.
00:10:12.000They're launching the BlackBerry again into the middle of the iPhone market.
00:10:17.000According to Axios, many top Democrats are convinced that if the election were held today, Joe Biden would lose a rematch with former President Trump.
00:10:23.000Biden's State of the Union address is probably going to feature some interesting moves, including, for example, an attempt to change the debate with regard to immigration.
00:10:36.000Joe Biden is now considering an executive order on immigration that would effectively Try to prevent more mass immigration into the United States.
00:10:47.000He's going to do this just before the election and attempt to take the issue off the table.
00:10:51.000Now, there's a pretty significant problem with that, which is, of course, that is a tacit admission that he could have done that all along.
00:10:56.000But again, Joe Biden is realizing that he is vulnerable.
00:10:58.000And so are most Democrats, even though they really don't want to believe it.
00:11:02.000And again, because this is a battle of good versus evil, according to Democrats, that means it's time to break a glass in case of emergency.
00:11:07.000The emergency is here and they are now breaking the glass.
00:11:10.000And that means that they are unleashing all the hounds of hell on Donald Trump, not just with regard to the criminal legal cases against him.
00:11:17.000But of course, last week we saw an insane fine levied by Judge Arthur Engeron against Donald Trump's business,
00:11:28.000Okay, this judgment is $354 million in damages.
00:11:32.000So just to recap what this case was, the accusation by Attorney General
00:11:37.000of the State of New York, Letitia James, was that Donald Trump fraudulently inflated
00:11:43.000his real estate holdings in an attempt to gain loans from private actors.
00:11:47.000There is no allegation that Donald Trump did not pay back those loans.
00:11:51.000There is no allegation by the people who actually gave the loans that Donald Trump ought to be prosecuted.
00:11:56.000They don't even have a case against him because they didn't suffer any damages.
00:11:59.000This is basically the same thing as if you went to a lender And you suggested that your house was worth more than it actually was worth, and they didn't bother to do an appraisal, or they did an appraisal, and their appraisal came back, and it was kind of within margin of error, or at least it was high enough that they decided, you know what, booming market will throw the loan at you anyway.
00:12:15.000And then later, the state came back at you and decided to fine you for a high multiple of whatever the loan was.
00:12:21.000According to NBC News, the judge who presided over the civil business fraud trial against Trump on Friday ordered the former president and his son's business associates and company to pay more than $350 million in damages and temporarily limited their ability to do business in New York.
00:12:37.000Engron, of course, had preset this thing.
00:12:39.000It was perfectly obvious from the get-go as soon as this trial laid out.
00:12:42.000He said Trump is guilty and it was just a question of how much money he was going to force Trump to pay.
00:12:48.000According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, they said that with pre-judgment interest, that judgment totals over $450 million.
00:12:55.000And in order for Trump to appeal, he has to come up with that money.
00:12:58.000That's the way the process works in New York.
00:12:59.000It is not as though you get to hold that money in abeyance pending an appeal.
00:13:03.000An appeal you would imagine would end with the overturning of this particular insane verdict.
00:13:10.000This is a bizarre statute in which the state of New York can charge you with fraud, not criminally, civilly, which requires a different standard of evidence.
00:13:17.000Criminally is beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:13:19.000Civilly is preponderance of the evidence, which means they just have to show by like a majority of the evidence that Donald Trump was fraudulent about his real estate holdings and then they can fine him 450 million dollars based on zero damages.
00:13:32.000Which is obviously an attempt to bankrupt him.
00:13:34.000It's obviously an attempt to make him non-liquid in advance of the election.
00:15:01.000The ruling also bars Trump and his company from even applying for any bank loans for three years.
00:15:05.000So he can't even get a bond for this thing.
00:15:06.000First of all, who's going to give a bond in the amount of $450 million?
00:15:10.000Normally, when you get charged with something or you have to come with the money and you go get a bond, the bond is repayable in a certain period of time.
00:15:17.000And you're talking about, you know, 10 grand.
00:15:19.000You're not talking about $450 million when your entire business organization has been voided for doing business in its home state for three years.
00:15:28.000Which means he's going to have to come up with a bunch of money, obviously.
00:15:33.000Engron also ordered the continued appointment of an independent monitor and the installation of an independent director of compliance for the company.
00:15:40.000Trump called it an illegal un-American judgment against me, my family, and my tremendous business.
00:15:44.000He said the decision is a complete and total sham.
00:15:56.000And by the way, this is stacked atop the judgment in favor of E. Jean Carroll, the least credible witness of all time, probably, in the amount of $83 million.
00:16:05.000So, civil trials, where Donald Trump now owes money, amount to well over half a billion dollars.
00:16:11.000All of that initiated since he lost the presidency in November of 2020.
00:16:15.000This is, of course, an insane judgment.
00:17:01.000I took down that video that I posted out Friday.
00:17:07.000Uh, because it went viral, went on TikTok, not because I don't stand by what I said, because I do, but, you know, my grandson's seen it, and, you know, he got a little hurt by it, and it hurt my feelings, so, you know, what the ****, you know?
00:17:24.000Um, I'm not no, look, I'm not no figurehead here, I'm not no, uh, leader of any movement, not going on any podcasts, or, You know, doing any GoFundMe's or anything like that.
00:18:05.000But you could see something more likely what you're going to see happening is every business person in New York who's remotely affiliated with any Republican position is going to pull their money.
00:18:13.000If you are living in New York right now and you are affiliated with the Trump campaign in any way, if you gave money to the Trump campaign, you're going to rush down to Florida as fast as humanly possible.
00:18:20.000You're about to see a money drain in the state of New York that is going to make the last few years pale in comparison.
00:18:25.000Because if you believe you can live in New York and not have your property expropriated by a judge, For what is kind of normal real estate business wheeling and dealing that operates around the edges in New York?
00:18:36.000I mean, let's be real about how real estate operates in New York.
00:18:39.000Why exactly would you stick around in New York for all of that?
00:18:42.000Meanwhile, federal agencies, the so-called deep state, they are attempting to insulate their own regulations against the possibility that Trump becomes president again.
00:18:49.000Now, this is the problem with the bureaucratic state initiated by Woodrow Wilson, is you have basically an independent body of regulators who work for the Democratic Party.
00:18:57.000And who are just going to ignore whatever Trump tries to do.
00:19:00.000Now what Trump is pledging to do is he's pledging to bring them under the umbrella of federal law that allows him to fire people, and he totally should.
00:19:06.000If he becomes president of the United States, regulators who are attempting to enshrine in law permanently regulations that outlive Joe Biden, Those people should be fired immediately.
00:19:18.000Donald Trump is right about that, but they're doing their damnedest to try and thwart Trump should he become president.
00:19:22.000According to Politico, presidential Biden's allies are getting antsy about his administration's pileup of unfinished environmental rules.
00:19:28.000Biden's agencies are facing a deadline this spring to finish some of their most important regulations to ensure a Republican Congress and White House cannot erase them next year.
00:19:36.000Complicating matters is the fact that the deadline won't be known until months after the rules are completed.
00:20:02.000But they're openly reporting that the regulatory state is attempting to enshrine in law all of these regulations to avoid Donald Trump's presidency.
00:20:11.000That's what they're attempting to do, again, because this is a fight against evil, according to these people, and they will use any means at their disposal.
00:20:18.000Meanwhile, obviously, On the foreign front, things are falling into absolute sheer chaos.
00:20:25.000And it's chaos on all sides, and it's really quite hideous.
00:20:29.000So Donald Trump put out a statement over the weekend on the death of Navalny, Alexei Navalny.
00:20:34.000So Alexei Navalny, of course, was almost certainly murdered by the Kremlin.
00:20:39.000He was, after he was attempted, they tried to kill him back in 2021.
00:20:45.000when they tried to kill him and failed, then they then arrested him.
00:20:50.000He came back to Russia, they arrested him immediately, they gave him a 30 year sentence,
00:20:53.000they sent him to the Gulag, and then they almost certainly murdered him.
00:20:57.000In the current contemporaneous reports coming out suggest that Navalny's body had signs of bruising.
00:21:37.000And seven minutes later, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was addressing the country's press.
00:21:41.000And that is not what happens after a person dies of natural causes.
00:21:46.000It doesn't take the government two minutes to announce his death.
00:21:49.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:22:55.000In fact, an inmate at the complex told Russian opposition media other prisoners were informed Navalny had died at 10 a.m., which is before the officially recorded death time of 2.17 p.m.
00:23:04.000And they described how unknown vehicles had arrived at the prison the night before.
00:23:07.000None of this should be particularly surprising because, again, just a few years ago, they attempted to poison him with a nerve agent called Novichok.
00:23:15.000Not only was this well documented, the documentary on HBO that you can watch, Navalny, actually documents Alexei Navalny literally calling up the people who tried to poison him and asking them what they did.
00:23:27.000He pretends that he's working for the government.
00:23:28.000He asked them and they just tell him straight up that they poisoned his underwear and then they hope that that would make it into his mouth by drinking a water bottle or something.
00:23:38.000Local paramedics have told opposition outlet Novaya Gazeta Europa that Navalny's body is currently being held at a different facility in the same area as the prison.
00:23:46.000They're not turning it over, presumably because there will be signs of actual murder on him.
00:23:51.000Yulia Navalnya, who is his wife, she said her late husband's body is being hidden because they're waiting for traces of yet another of Putin's Novichok to disappear.
00:24:00.000Novichok is a chemical nerve agent that kills you, and then eventually the signs of it wear off in the body.
00:24:07.000The Russian government thought it had worn off in the body and then the Germans were able to actually detect it last time they used Novichok against Navalny.
00:24:13.000Okay, so Donald Trump then put out a comment on Navalny after several days of not saying anything.
00:24:18.000And he said, the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware
00:24:31.000We're a nation in decline, a failing nation, MAGA 2024.
00:24:35.000Okay, so there are a few things to be said about this.
00:24:37.000One, the last half where he talks about the decline of the country and the militarization
00:24:41.000of the Justice Department, militarization of our judicial system, all of that part's true.
00:24:46.000It is totally wrong for Donald Trump to compare that to the judicial arraignment, arrest, without process, without due process, without real charges, jailing and murder of Vladimir Putin's political opponents.
00:25:12.000And we should recognize that because, again, many of these problems are fixable with, say, elections, or, say, with moving, or, say, with impeachment of bad judges.
00:25:22.000The same is not true remotely in Russia.
00:25:25.000So it's problematic to compare America to Russia for two reasons.
00:25:28.000One, it degrades the actual state of play in the United States.
00:25:30.000When you hear journalists traveling abroad and decrying the state of censorship in the United States, in Russia, where they literally kill the dissidents, that's a bad look.
00:25:55.000You can even make the case against American involvement in Ukraine without talking up Putin.
00:25:59.000But then again, I suppose you can't because here is the thing.
00:26:03.000It is in America's interest to watch America's geopolitical rivals downgraded in terms of military capacity.
00:26:09.000It is not in America's interest to watch those geopolitical rivals gobble up large segments of the globe in terms of territory and population that have control over things like grain and oil.
00:26:19.000Making a realpolitik case for why the United States should basically acquiesce in Russian military land grabs, that's a very difficult case to make.
00:26:27.000So the only case that you're left making is effectively that Russia is not that bad or that Ukraine is worse or whatever it is.
00:26:33.000The problem is Russia is kind of that bad.
00:26:35.000So if you want to make the case that America doesn't have a geopolitical interest in Ukraine, make that case.
00:26:39.000But many of the people who are making that case are not really making that case.
00:26:42.000They're making a broader case, which is that Russia is not that bad, that somehow Putin is a guardian of Christianity, or Putin is a defender of Western values against secular liberalism.
00:26:55.000Vladimir Putin is a proponent of Russian greatness.
00:27:00.000Russian greatness is largely based, historically speaking, on Russian land control.
00:27:04.000That has been true for literally hundreds of years.
00:27:07.000By the way, Putin will say that himself in his interview with Tucker Carlson, for example.
00:27:11.000He literally spent the first 35 minutes explaining the history of Russia's control of land.
00:27:17.000At no point did he talk about, quote-unquote, the spread of Russian values or the importance of Christianity.
00:27:22.000In fact, when Tucker tried to prompt him on that, he actually dodged the question.
00:27:25.000So let's talk about what's in America's interest at this point with regard to Russia and what Russia's actually doing.
00:27:31.000So what Russia's attempting to do on a foreign policy level is sort of recreate the red-green-brown alliance.
00:27:38.000So, back at the outset of World War II, there effectively was a red-green-brown alliance, and that alliance was between the Nazis and the Soviets and the Islamists, because people forget about this, but the Islamists were working the entire Second World War effectively with the Nazis.
00:27:55.000The new attempt by Russia is to recreate that internationally and with some help from domestic friends in other countries.
00:28:03.000What that means is that in this particular vision, Russia actually is not red.
00:28:08.000The reds would be Marxists, people on the far left who believe that the West is a nefarious force in the world and that everything bad that's been happening in the world is some sort of weird blowback to America.
00:28:18.000And those people have advocated for America's enemies for a very, very long time.
00:28:21.000This would be like Bernie Sanders, who suggests that everything that happens in America is what's been driving places elsewhere, and we ought to withdraw from the world because it's better for the world for America not to be involved in other parts of the world.
00:28:32.000America's a nefarious Howard Zinn-like force in the world.
00:28:34.000They're joined by some people on the right.
00:28:37.000Who have sort of horseshoe-theoried this thing where America is really, really bad.
00:28:40.000And again, American foreign policy is responsible for all the blowback that has happened over the course of time.
00:28:45.000So you have sort of this horseshoe theory that you can put in sort of the red category.
00:29:09.000His country is run like a fascist oligarchy.
00:29:12.000They have like a 13% flat tax, but in order to own property, And to have your property be secure, you have to be an ally of the dictator, which is the way that it works over there.
00:29:20.000China, by the way, is in sort of the same category.
00:29:22.000China is sort of titularly communist, but they're more fascist than they are communist, considering that they've allowed large swaths of market activity inside the country.
00:29:29.000So they're more corporatist at this point than they are actually communist.
00:29:33.000So this anti-American alliance is what Vladimir Putin is actually pursuing at this point.
00:29:38.000You can see it cropping up all over the globe.
00:29:40.000We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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00:30:51.000This is presumably why Lula da Silva, who is supposedly the great savior of democracy according to the American left in Brazil, over the weekend, he literally said on Navalny's death, quote, I'm not going to jump to conclusions.
00:31:32.000He said what is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people does not exist at any other historical moment.
00:31:41.000In fact, it existed when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.
00:31:44.000So full-scale anti-Semitic language here, right?
00:31:46.000The idea is that the Jews are the new Hitlers and the Palestinians who initiated the murderous rage fest in which they killed 1,200 Israeli citizens.
00:31:53.000They're still holding 100 Israeli citizens underground in Gaza right now.
00:32:00.000Lula is upholding the alliance with Hamas, with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with the radical Islamists, with the Greens, because he is in fact a Red, and he is making common cause with people like Vladimir Putin, who really isn't a Red anymore, he's more of a Brown.
00:32:13.000Vladimir Putin, because he's kind of a fascist.
00:32:15.000And when I say kind of, I mean he has complete governmental control of literally every aspect of his society, and is not fully a communist, right?
00:32:21.000He lets the oligarchs keep their money so long as they serve his interests.
00:32:28.000It's a very problematic alliance for the United States.
00:32:31.000Because again, Russia now controls large segments of the Middle East.
00:32:34.000They have an alliance with Iran, for example.
00:32:37.000They have an alliance with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
00:32:41.000Over the weekend, in fact, Hamas was invited by Russia to visit.
00:32:47.000According to the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said over the weekend, Russia invited Palestinian factions to meet in Moscow at some point in late February.
00:32:56.000Moscow has already hosted a Hamas delegation in October.
00:32:59.000In October, that Hamas delegation, which was led by senior Hamas member Moussa Abu Marzouk, met with the Russian and Iranian deputy foreign ministers Mikhail Bogdanov and Ali Bagheri-Khani.
00:33:08.000That meeting represented a convening of interest between Russia, Iran, and Hamas.
00:33:13.000The relationship between Russia and terrorist groups in the Middle East is quite real, obviously.
00:33:18.000And then you have the left in Europe, which is backing those interests as well.
00:33:21.000So, for example, you have Josep Borrell, who's the head of EU foreign policy, who says that Israel should stop attacking Hamas now because Hamas is really more of an idea as opposed to, you know, a terror group.
00:33:45.000Meanwhile, Iran is on the move as well.
00:33:48.000So over the weekend, Iran actually destroyed the Houthis, which are an Iranian offshoot, sank a British ship in the Red Sea.
00:33:56.000According to Ynet News, the UK's Maritime Trade Operations Agency reported on Monday the Houthis sunk a ship traveling in the Red Sea south of the port city of Mukha in Yemen.
00:34:05.000It's the first time since Israel's war on Hamas that a crew had to abandon their ship because of the Houthis.
00:34:11.000Meanwhile, by the way, The United States had to strike five Houthi targets in Yemen, including an underwater drone.
00:34:17.000That technology is coming from the Iranians, who, of course, are working with the Russians.
00:34:21.000According to the New York Times, the United States struck five Houthi military targets, including an undersea drone, in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Saturday, according to the U.S.
00:34:37.000But the Houthis are receiving much of the technology directly from Iran, of course.
00:34:43.000The formation of this entire coalition, which has happened under the auspices of Joe Biden, is incredibly dangerous to America's interests.
00:34:50.000The solution to that is not to downplay what Russia is in the world.
00:34:54.000The solution to that is to face up to what Russia is in the world and to muscularly protect America's interests around the globe.
00:35:02.000It does mean that America does certainly have an interest in, say, free shipping across the world.
00:35:05.000Whatever the cost is of the Ukraine war, It is significantly less than what happens if freedom of the seas decreases to the point where every ship is avoiding the Red Sea and the Suez Canal completely.
00:35:15.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:35:48.000Meanwhile, of course, all this was led off by the American...
00:35:51.000Surrender in Afghanistan to the 8th century thugs who were the Taliban.
00:35:55.000And now, as it turns out, unsurprisingly, remember that time that Joe Biden said that Al Qaeda would never be in Afghanistan again, that we had achieved our purposes?
00:36:02.000Spoiler alert, they're in Afghanistan again.
00:36:04.000According to the Jerusalem Post, the Al Qaeda terrorist organization is having a resurgence in Afghanistan under the ruling Taliban, setting up eight new training camps alongside five madrasas, Islamic educational institutions around the country.
00:36:14.000That is a report from the UN Security Council from late January.
00:36:18.000The report said the training camps are located in various provinces, including Khazni, Lakhman, Parwan, and Uruzgan.
00:36:23.000It also listed sites used by al-Qaeda to move its operatives in and out of neighboring Iran, and said that a new base to stockpile weaponry has been established in the Panjshir Valley, north of the capital of Kabul.
00:36:34.000Again, what we are watching in real time is an alliance of convenience between Russia and China, and it's including Iran.
00:36:40.000And those countries are seeking to make common cause with left-wing countries in South America and in Africa as well to create, effectively, an anti-American bloc.
00:36:50.000That is what is happening in real time, and that's been led off by the era of Joe Biden surrender-laden politics.
00:36:56.000There's a lot of attempt here, by the way, to pass this off as a result of Trump.
00:37:05.000Russia was fairly contained while Donald Trump was president of the United States.
00:37:09.000They were fearful, if not of his rhetoric, then of his unpredictability.
00:37:13.000China was not exactly certain what Donald Trump was going to do, but they are perfectly certain of what Joe Biden is going to do.
00:37:18.000And that is put up a soft show of force, slow walk aid to America's allies, vacillate, because the Democratic Party is vacillating.
00:37:28.000This is why when Joe Biden tries to suggest, for example, that the blood of Alexei Navalny is on the hands of Republicans, that's an amazing statement.
00:37:36.000He's the current president of the United States.
00:37:38.000If the president gets the credit or blame for what happens while he's president, I noticed that this old dude is the current president of the United States.
00:38:09.000When Navalny returned to Russia and then Navalny was immediately arrested and gulagged, Joe Biden said there would be significant repercussions for Russia should that happen, should Navalny be murdered.
00:38:17.000Well, now Navalny's been murdered and Joe Biden ain't doing bleep.
00:38:22.000But, again, this is a broad-scale problem for the United States, and it is a conflict of vision with regard to foreign policy.
00:38:28.000I would say the foreign policy debate in the United States breaks down into at least four camps.
00:38:31.000First, there are the neocons, who have sort of an outsized role in the American imagination because of the Warner Rock.
00:38:36.000The neocons essentially made the argument, the Wilsonian argument, that it was America's job to preserve and foster democracy everywhere on Earth, regardless as to whether it was in America's direct or indirect interest.
00:38:46.000That effectively, American values had to be spread No matter what, and that the safest world was a world in which American values predominated, even in places that were very unfriendly to American values.
00:38:56.000That school of thought has basically gone by the wayside, and anybody who says the word neocon right now, with regard to the vast majority of politicians, is just talking nonsense.
00:39:05.000The vast majority of politicians, even on the sort of hawkish right, were not in favor, for example, of the war in Libya, or direct American involvement in Syria.
00:39:16.000And many of them are not in favor of, for example, heavy involvement even in Ukraine today.
00:39:20.000So, again, the sort of neocon idea was thoroughly defeated by Donald Trump in 2016 and was rather significantly discredited by the Warner Rock.
00:39:30.000So that school of thought, I would say, has been largely marginalized.
00:39:33.000Then there is the sort of realpolitik school of thought, which is there are certain conflicts in which America does have an interest.
00:39:40.000And that doesn't mean boots on the ground.
00:39:43.000It means sometimes boots on the ground, depending on just how strong those interests are.
00:39:46.000But America does, in fact, have foreign interests, and America must apply its leverage in strategic ways in order to achieve those interests.
00:39:52.000That means getting involved in some conflicts with money, say, funding Ukraine to stop Russia from taking over Kiev But not necessarily throwing money down the rat hole of attempting to have them take over Crimea, which is not going to happen, for example.
00:40:04.000I would count myself in the real politique camp of American foreign policy.
00:40:11.000Isolationists sort of suggest that America has no interest In what goes on around the world, what's happening anywhere, that America's interests are simply domestic, and that any dollar that is spent outside of America's borders is therefore a bad dollar.
00:40:25.000I think this is short-sighted and wrong, but you understand the tendency.
00:40:29.000It's short-sighted in the sense that America actually does have a very strong interest in, for example, freedom of the seas.
00:40:34.000America has an incredibly strong interest in how, for example, oil flows around the globe.
00:40:40.000America does, in fact, have a very strong interest in American allies Being prevented from falling or being destroyed or being significantly harmed because those allies are the ones who are going to come to our defense if, God forbid, there were an attack on the United States.
00:40:53.000There are a bunch of foreign interests that exist.
00:40:55.000I think the isolationist position is untenable.
00:40:58.000And when people suggest that it's somehow immoral, that foreign aid in general is immoral, I just wonder what they would have said about the Marshall Plan.
00:41:12.000I think that's incredibly short-sighted. But that isolationist wing is a third wing.
00:41:16.000And then there's the fourth horseshoe theory wing of foreign policy.
00:41:19.000And the horseshoe theory wing is occupied by an increasingly large segment of the left
00:41:24.000and, shockingly, a small but increasingly large segment of the right.
00:41:27.000And that horseshoe theory wing is not isolationist in the sense that it's
00:41:30.000just not in America's interest to be involved in foreign policy.
00:41:33.000It's the idea that America itself is deeply flawed and bad, and that every act that happens abroad is a result of the evils of the United States, of past American interventionism, of America's foreign interests, and that America should retreat from the world, not because it's in America's interest to do so, but because it's in the world's interest for America to do so.
00:41:52.000And that theory Involves the propping up of terrible dictators.
00:41:56.000It involves the leaving in power of some of the world's worst people.
00:42:00.000It involves leaving allies out to dry, right?
00:42:02.000That sort of stuff is the fourth wing of American politics.
00:42:06.000And the problem that we are seeing right now is a conflation of various wings of American politics on all sides of the various aisles.
00:42:15.000When it comes to Joe Biden's foreign policy, Joe Biden's foreign policy vacillates between sort of what he thinks is the real politic And the horseshoe theory.
00:42:24.000It vacillates strongly between those two poles.
00:42:27.000Because that's where the Democratic Party is split.
00:42:28.000Between the real politique, there are some Democrats who still understand that America has foreign interests.
00:42:33.000And those Democrats, for example, support foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel, by and large.
00:42:39.000And then you have the Democratic wing that is sort of the radical young people who believe that America is bad and terrible in the world and basically should revert to its own borders and then open those borders.
00:42:55.000And so you've seen the Biden administration, because Joe Biden, can't actually bridge that gap, vacillating between the two positions wildly.
00:43:01.000And that has led the rest of the world to conclude that America is in fact quite weak.
00:43:06.000And the rest of the world is not necessarily wrong on that score.
00:43:10.000Meanwhile, as far as the Republicans, who Joe Biden is blaming for all of this, it's unclear exactly what the Republican Party is doing at this point because the Republican Party has laid out various different views of its own on exactly what American foreign policy should look like and you actually have members of probably all four wings of the foreign policy establishment that I just described in the Republican Party.
00:43:31.000You have members of like two wings in the Democratic Party and you have members of probably all four wings in the Republican Party.
00:43:35.000You have a small niche sort of neocon wing, a very large realpolitik wing, you have a small but growing isolationist wing, and you have an even smaller but still growing wing of horseshoe theory, folks.
00:43:47.000And the Republican Party is split between all of those, which leads to a very confused and confusing take on what foreign policy ought to be.
00:43:54.000So it's unclear exactly what's going to happen in the House of Representatives.
00:43:56.000All I would say is, is it in America's interest for Russia to take Ukraine whole?
00:44:00.000Not for Russia to maintain the Donbass or Crimea and end the war.
00:44:02.000I think everybody, if they could make that deal happen, who's of rational mind, wants that deal to happen.
00:44:07.000The question is whether Vladimir Putin wants that deal to happen.
00:44:09.000I see no indicators at this point that he does.
00:44:11.000He believes the West is going to collapse.
00:44:15.000Because of Vietnam, and because of Iraq, and because every major foreign policy commitment that the West has made over the course of the last 40 years, certainly since the end of the Cold War, has largely ended with the West retreating to its own borders and nefarious powers taking territory.
00:44:30.000Whether you're talking about Hong Kong or you're talking about Afghanistan.
00:44:34.000So Vladimir Putin is simply playing for time.
00:44:36.000Meanwhile, again, the Republicans are very split on this sort of stuff.
00:44:39.000Representative Mike Turner, who's the head of the House Intelligence Committee of Ohio, he says that right now the House Speaker is trying to clear a path for Ukraine aid, but having a tough time of it.
00:44:48.000As you know, President Zelensky has been asking for this aid since October for five months now.
00:44:53.000Has Speaker Johnson given you any assurances that he is going to bring Ukraine aid to the floor?
00:45:02.000Well, President Johnson has made a number of public statements committing to finding a pathway for the aid for Ukraine.
00:45:20.000But one of the big problems, of course, is that because all the parties are split along various lines, it's not even clear what people want from Ukraine.
00:45:25.000So according to Politico, people in Munich, there's a Munich security conference.
00:45:30.000And a bunch of people showed up from various countries.
00:45:32.000Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the aid package being considered would be quote-unquote a game changer for Ukraine, but he did not make clear exactly what victory even looked like.
00:45:45.000He declined to say that the support would ensure Ukrainian triumph.
00:45:48.000Instead, he just said that it was sort of the last hope.
00:45:50.000It's unclear exactly what's going to happen in Ukraine, and this is part of the problem.
00:45:53.000Joe Biden has not even articulated what an end looks like in Ukraine.
00:45:57.000It's why you're seeing the rising isolationist and horseshoe theory wing.
00:46:00.000Because you do, in fact, have to tell your own citizens what the hell your plans are when you spend significant amounts of foreign aid abroad.
00:46:07.000Even if you want to say, as I would say, that we are better off funding Ukraine to stave off a Russian taking of Kiev, With the less than 1% of money that we spend on our federal budget every year and a fairly insignificant percentage even of our defense budget to basically restock our shelves, grease the wheels in terms of getting our military production capacity up to snuff.
00:46:48.000The Philippine Sea, which is a swath of the Pacific Ocean east of Taiwan, was the site of a decisive aircraft carrier battle in World War II between the United States and Japan.
00:46:56.000And carriers are now once again gathering there, and for good reason.
00:46:59.000Control of the Philippine Sea would be prized in any conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan or the South China Sea.
00:47:06.000warships, troops, and supplies deployed from bases on Guam or Hawaii would likely need to transit through that area, and China would want to interrupt those flows.
00:47:12.000You are seeing the Chinese attempting to take control of that particular location.
00:47:17.000In October of 2023, Chinese aircraft carrier and four other warships did a drill there.
00:47:22.000In September, they did another drill in this particular area.
00:47:25.000In January, the United States held a drill there.
00:47:27.000And vacillation at home leads to foreign aggression.
00:47:31.000Vladimir Lenin famously suggested that his foreign policy was probe with bayonets, push where there's mush.
00:47:38.000America's enemies know that and they are seeing an awful lot of mush at this point.
00:47:41.000Okay, meanwhile, on the American domestic front, America's racial problems continue to be seen in the halls of woke academia.
00:47:51.000There's an amazing interview that was done with the Free Press by Roland Fryer.
00:47:56.000Roland Fryer is a Harvard professor who became the youngest black person ever to be awarded tenure at an Ivy League school at the age of 30.
00:48:02.000He says that he faces threats and had to get armed security after he published a study in 2016 showing no racial bias in police-involved shootings.
00:48:11.000In fact, his research found that officers were less likely to shoot black people than white people in similar situations, although the difference was not statistically significant, as the Epoch Times points out.
00:48:21.000He said, I let the data talk and I don't care what it cost.
00:48:24.000But then apparently, he told Barry Weiss, who's the editor of the Free Press and the founder of it, he told her that he expected his research to show different conclusions.
00:48:31.000But when the research showed no bias in police-involved shootings, he hired a new team of assistants and repeated the exact same study.
00:48:46.000Former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, Alleged that Fryer's conduct with regard to one of his aides exhibited a pattern of behavior that failed to meet expectations and he was suspended from Harvard two years after being accused of engaging in quote, unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.
00:49:07.000Here is Roland Fryer discussing with Barry Weiss what it means to cross the establishment at one of these universities.
00:49:13.000One of the details in this story is that you were suspended by a woman who I had never heard of until recently.
00:49:20.000Her name is Claudine Gay, and she said this in a letter to the economics department at the time.
00:49:25.000Professor Fryer exhibited a pattern of behavior that failed to meet the expectations of conduct within our community and was harmful to the well-being of its members.
00:49:33.000The totality of these behaviors is a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of trust of the Harvard community.
00:49:40.000So I guess I want to ask, do you believe in karma?
00:50:05.000Again, the fact that that is hard to say at Harvard University, but get rid of Roland Fryer was very easy to say at Harvard University, is demonstrative of where our racial politics currently stands.
00:50:14.000You know, over the weekend, Joy Reid had herself a sane and solid day.
00:50:18.000She suggested that she deserves reparations, did Joy Reid.
00:50:23.000Which is weird, since her parents are immigrants to the country, and are not, in fact, American descendants of slaves.
00:50:29.000Here was Joy Reid talking about race in America, To be a black person in 2024 in America is to be in a state of complete perplexed confusion about what is wrong with a country that hates your history, to this day can't admit even the basics of what was done to your ancestors, can't accept any responsibility for the lack that has carried through the entirety of the existence of you in this country,
00:51:00.000And think 60 years of relative freedom is enough.
00:51:04.000And to find out that literally Barack Obama's two terms as president are your reparations.
00:51:11.000And Juneteenth, which you already celebrated anyway, is your reparations.
00:51:51.000Actually, slavery is a drag on economic productivity pretty much everywhere that it is practiced.
00:51:55.000But put aside that entire argument, Joy Reid saying this, talking about how it's very difficult to be Joy Reid is pretty astonishing, considering, again, her dad is from Congo and her mom is from Guyana.
00:52:04.000And, uh, and she is a multi-millionaire.
00:52:06.000But this is the state of our racial discourse in the United States.