Is it too late to stop World War III from breaking out? A new book written by a British historian, Richard Overy posits three types of WWIII that could break out, and why they are more likely than not to happen, and what we should do about it. This episode is brought to you by Modern Crisis, a podcast produced by Popular Science and edited by Alex Blumberg. The opinions expressed here are our own, not those of our corporations, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our respective governments. We are not experts, and we do not hold any of this information dear to our own. This podcast is not meant to be a substitute for professional military advice, or military advice. It is meant to point the finger at the problem and suggest ways to prevent it from happening in the first place. If you are a military strategist, or someone who wants to know how to prevent WWIII from happening, this podcast is for you. Listen to this episode to get some tips on how you can prevent a WWIII, and how to prepare for it, from someone who is an expert on the subject. Tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we can prevent WWI from happening. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What are your thoughts on WWIII? 4:30 - What is your biggest fear? 5:00 6:40 - What would you do to stop WWI? 7: What are you worried about? 8:15 - What do you fear most? 9:20 - Is it's too late? 11: What s the worst thing you can we do? 12: How do we stop it? 13:00 | Is it too Late? 15:30 | What do we need to be prepared? 16:40 | What are we fighting for? 17:30 18: What is the best thing we can do to prevent a world war? 19: Does it matter? 21:20 | What s our best chance? 22:30 // Is it possible to stop a war in the 21st century? 23: Is there any chance of a civil war in Europe? ? 25:30 Is there a better country? 26:40 27:30 Can we stop WWIII too late yet? 29:10 | What is our worst enemy?
00:00:56.000Chinese frustration over the status of Taiwan prompts a buildup of invasion forces.
00:01:00.000The United States is preoccupied with its own domestic political crisis.
00:01:04.000Japan anxiously watches the exchange of harsh words between China and Taiwan, wondering whether to intervene.
00:01:09.000And eventually, China tries something, siding with North Korea and Russia.
00:01:14.000Or a possible different kind of conflict, a growing division between the Democratic West and authoritarian states across Eurasia, in which there is some sort of space-based attack that takes out communication systems in the West, the West attributes it to the East, and suddenly you have a world war.
00:01:31.000What Richard Overy suggests is that we are looking in the wrong place.
00:01:33.000We need to look at the human penchant for war.
00:01:36.000How exactly do we stop the human penchant for war?
00:01:38.000But trying to change human nature is generally a giant fail.
00:01:42.000The reality is that when it comes to foreign policy, aggression thrives where strength is absent.
00:01:49.000Aggression thrives where strength is absent.
00:01:51.000A vacuum of power begs for some sort of intervention, usually by a more hostile power.
00:01:57.000Each of the scenarios that is spelled out here by Richard Overy are scenarios in which the West demonstrates its weakness.
00:02:03.000Because the reality is that Iran gaining a nuclear weapon, for example, that would be the legacy of West that has mollycoddled Iran since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
00:02:13.000The possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would be because the West failed to Despite their attempt to integrate China into the world system, believing ridiculously that globalized economics would suddenly make China into a moderate power.
00:02:28.000Or the possibility of an attack by some sort of Eastern power on the communication satellites of the West, which would provoke a war.
00:02:36.000The only reason that would happen is if there was a misperception of the possibility of Western response.
00:02:43.000When aggressive powers around the world see weak Western powers, that is when they act.
00:02:48.000And what we have in the West over the course of the last several generations, particularly since the end of the Cold War, is a West that does not know what it stands for and that is internally divided and raging against itself.
00:02:58.000This is coming to the fore in many places around the world.
00:03:01.000It's especially coming to the fore actually not in the United States right now, although it is, but in Europe, where you are starting to see right-wing parties on the rise and so-called centrist and left-wing parties are freaking out about it.
00:03:13.000The reason those right-wing parties are on the rise is because the center-left in Europe has basically forgotten why exactly those nations exist in the first place.
00:03:21.000Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is an excellent symptom of this.
00:03:25.000So he warned on Monday a victory for either the far left or the far right in this month's snap election could spark civil war.
00:03:32.000Again, the prelude to civil war within countries usually is people talking about civil war.
00:03:37.000Because the reality is that until that becomes an actual ensconced thought in people's head, nobody actually thinks about it.
00:03:43.000That's why in the United States, I've chided politicians on both the right and the left when they talk about the possibility of a civil war in the United States.
00:03:50.000But number two, when you talk about that, you make things significantly worse.
00:03:53.000Right now, it is Emmanuel Macron who's talking like that in an attempt to scare people into voting for him.
00:03:59.000He says the far-right's answer to insecurity, quote, reduces people to their religion or their origin and therefore pushes people toward civil war.
00:04:07.000Or maybe it is centrist policy, in France, left-wing policy on immigration, that has brought in a bunch of people who do not care about Frenchness, who do not care about Westernization.
00:04:17.000who are very much involved in destroying, on the basis of multiculturalism, the common values that were once held in places like France.
00:04:24.000And that internal division is presaging the possibility of broader conflict.
00:04:28.000In other words, when the West is perceived as weak and internally divided, that is when attacks on the West tend to increase.
00:04:35.000It's not just true for the West, it's true everywhere.
00:04:38.000Whenever there is a perception of weakness, the enemies of a country that is internally divided tend to take advantage of that situation.
00:04:47.000By contrast, when the West is internally united, and when the West has the moral stomach to look at its enemies and recognize that it is not concessions that its enemies generally want, it is not niceties, that very often it is just an iron wall That if there is, in fact, a loss of hope among America's enemies, among the West's enemies, that is better for America than attempting, again, to massage and mollycoddle America's enemies when the West realizes that America's enemies tend to back down.
00:05:18.000Because as it turns out, America's the strongest military force in the history of the world, bar none.
00:05:24.000The West right now is militarily superior to all competitors, including Russia and including China.
00:05:31.000But is the West's lack of focus, lack of vision, that is leading to the possibility of an outbreak of a World War III?
00:05:36.000We'll get to more on this in one second.
00:05:38.000First, Saudi Arabia recently ended its 50-year petrodollar deal with the United States.
00:05:42.000That has the potential to weaken the U.S.
00:05:54.000It's for reasons like this I feel it's important to diversify some of your savings into gold.
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00:06:40.000The entire idea of peace through strength is not that you fight everywhere, it's that you fight nowhere, because everyone is afraid to challenge you.
00:06:47.000President Trump once expressed it to me this way.
00:06:49.000We were talking at a fundraiser, and he was talking about Ukraine and Russia.
00:06:55.000And President Trump said, You wanna know the reason why Vladimir Putin never attacked Ukraine?
00:06:59.000It's because I told him, Vlad, Vlad, if you attack Ukraine, I will bomb the f*** out of you.
00:07:07.000And Vladimir Putin looked at me and said, no you won't, Mr. President.
00:07:20.000It turns out that a show of strength very often dissuades the bad guys from trying things.
00:07:26.000This is why it is so extraordinarily destructive and terrible that in the United States, we have internal divisions that allow for fans of terrorist groups to wander the streets beating people up.
00:07:40.000A country that is worth its salt does not stand for this sort of thing on an ideological level.
00:07:46.000Now, the reality is that the Democratic Party has fallen into a trap of believing At least on its more radical front.
00:07:54.000That the United States is inherently bad.
00:07:56.000That the United States owes an apology to the rest of the world.
00:08:02.000During the Bush administration, John Kerry did some of this, suggesting that America was a nefarious force in the world.
00:08:08.000And that really accelerated with Barack Obama, who campaigned on the basis that America was aerating villages and bombing civilians in Afghanistan, which was a slander, a gross slander against American troops in Afghanistan.
00:08:18.000And then, in his first act as president, he went on an apology tour around the Middle East, proclaiming that Western interventionism around the world was some sort of net bad.
00:08:26.000He was apologizing to Muslim dictators all over the world at the very beginning of his presidency.
00:08:31.000And that has now become baked into the Democratic cake.
00:08:47.000When you have 300,000 Hamas-supporting terrible people marching in London, that is a problem for London.
00:08:56.000When you have people in the United States who are showing up outside synagogues and beating people up because they're attempting to get in to go to some sort of real estate conference, which is what happened in Los Angeles over the weekend, that is a problem for the United States.
00:09:09.000That's not particularly a problem for Israel.
00:09:10.000Well, that is, in fact, what happened over the weekend.
00:09:15.000According to the Wall Street Journal, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with pro-Israeli demonstrators and blocked access to an L.A.
00:09:21.000synagogue Sunday in a violent episode condemned by President Biden and other leaders as anti-Semitic.
00:09:27.000If you're standing outside a synagogue to block people from going into the synagogue because you don't like Israel, imagine that the roles were reversed for just a moment.
00:09:34.000There was a terrorist attack somewhere and people started chanting outside of mosques and blocking people from getting in.
00:09:39.000What do you think the media reaction would be?
00:09:42.000Dozens of protesters shoved, punched, and yelled at each other near the Adas Torah Synagogue in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, an area with a sizable Jewish population.
00:10:06.000Here are pro-Hamas protesters who are blocking entrance to the shul.
00:10:09.000Apparently, according to people who were there, including Noah Pollack, the police officers were stationed outside the synagogue, the Adas Torah synagogue.
00:10:17.000They were stationed outside of it, and the Hamas protesters were behind them, like between the cops and the entrance.
00:10:22.000So instead of trying to secure the entryway for Jews who wanted to go to synagogue for this real estate conference or whatever, They actually were protecting the Hamas protesters.
00:10:30.000Jews were forced to go into the back door of the synagogue in Los Angeles.
00:10:35.000Here's what some of that video looks like.
00:10:37.000We can see Hamas protesters who are running around with poles and keffiyehs.
00:10:51.000Again, my family and I used to eat here all the time.
00:10:53.000They're like blocking off the street, like fully blocking off the street here.
00:11:00.000Some of them are holding a woman on the ground and physically assaulting her.
00:11:07.000Daniel Greenfield was covering this for Front Page Magnet.
00:11:10.000And then you see people who are hitting each other, of course, because it turns out that if the police aren't going to do anything, people are going to defend themselves.
00:11:16.000And all of this begins with protests outside of Eshol.
00:11:20.000Here is a woman who is being held to the ground by a pro-Camas protester.
00:11:24.000So Daniel Greenfields, who's a writer for Front Page Mag, is 30 minutes after Camas supporters first set up their operation outside an L.A.
00:11:38.000These are directives that are coming down from the top.
00:11:40.000They are coming from the top of the LAPD and the mayor's office.
00:11:43.000Not until an hour into the terrorist rally outside a synagogue did the LAPD finally step in, pushing back masked Jihad supporters in Hafea terrorist scarves from the entrance of Congregation Adas Torah, which they had occupied.
00:11:54.000Then the mob, chanting calls for intifada and the destruction of Israel, moved outward to target two smaller synagogues attended by Persian Jewish refugees from Islamic terror in Iran.
00:12:03.000Billions of us will come and kill you, a heavily accented Middle Eastern man in a keffiyeh unprompted raffed at me as I walked up.
00:12:09.000Only dozens had actually shown up, but they made up for it with bullhorns, robotic chants, and assaults in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood.
00:12:18.000Remember that time that there were a bunch of white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville?
00:12:21.000And President Trump suggested, not that there were good people among the Nazis, but that when it came to the debate over the removal of Confederate monuments, there were good people on both sides, and then he condemned the neo-Nazis, and then the entire media covered it as though he had made excuses for the neo-Nazis.
00:12:34.000In fact, that incident was supposedly so morally egregious, because Donald Trump didn't say enough, that Joe Biden said he got into the 2020 presidential race because of Charlottesville.
00:12:44.000Well, pretty much every weekend there is now a Charlottesville across the country with pro-Hamas supporters who are Democrats.
00:12:50.000That's the only reason why Joe Biden is humoring them.
00:12:53.000Going to Jewish areas, chanting outside synagogues, going to Jewish businesses, chanting outside Jewish businesses, trying to hold up traffic, sometimes getting involved in physical assault.
00:13:02.000Already one Jew was killed in Los Angeles for the great crime of being pro-Israel.
00:13:05.000He was smashed over the head with a bullhorn.
00:13:09.000Again, the reality is that this is not a problem for Israel or for the Jews alone.
00:13:14.000This is a problem for the United States.
00:13:16.000People who are wandering around the United States wearing terrorist scarves, chanting slogans on behalf of Hamas, is a problem for the United States.
00:13:23.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:14:06.000The LAPD did little to interfere with the terrorist supporters, but did block Jewish counter-protesters from reaching their own synagogue.
00:14:11.000The police also did nothing as clumps of mass Hamas supporters broke away from the synagogue and began confronting, threatening, and attacking Jewish community members on the street.
00:15:06.000Or would there have to be some remark about the ideology, the evil ideology of the people who are actually doing this terrible activity?
00:15:14.000Joe Biden only is willing to comment on the excesses of the protesters, but never on the content of the protest itself.
00:15:19.000Which is quite fascinating, because you know if it were about white supremacy, he wouldn't stop there.
00:15:23.000It would be all about the evil of the cause.
00:15:26.000But the problem is that for Joe Biden and Democrats, because inherently they believe that the West is some sort of imperialist, colonialist power, or at least they're afraid of people who do, they won't say a word about the cause itself.
00:15:36.000They'll just say, don't do bad things.
00:16:30.000Meanwhile, localities all over the United States are releasing pro-Hamas protesters who violated the law during the university uprising of 2024.
00:18:22.000Israel has spent every year since 1948 building up a successful state.
00:18:26.000A state that has something like $57,000 in terms of per capita GDP.
00:18:31.000Meanwhile, the United States and its allies have poured billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, into places like the Gaza Strip, into the Palestinian areas of Judea and Samaria.
00:18:41.000And in return, the West has been given hundreds of miles of terror tunnels and the wild popularity of Hamas.
00:18:48.000Now, the Western left suggests that that's because of exploitation and evil on the part of the people who spent their time actually building a successful state.
00:18:55.000This mirrors, of course, leftist prescription when it comes to inequality in the West.
00:18:59.000Don't look to the individual action or the individual actor.
00:19:08.000This is the philosophy of intersectionality in the West.
00:19:11.000If you are a member of a less successful group on any level, that means that the society itself has victimized you and that particularly breaks down in terms of race.
00:19:18.000And so when you extend that to the Middle East, the Jews are the white people and the Palestinians are the brown people, as Cori Bush and AOC keep proclaiming.
00:19:26.000And all of this sort of stuff continues to be promoted by the Biden administration, which refuses to understand the stakes of any sort of ideological conflict here.
00:19:34.000So Tony Blinken is apparently now warning Yoav Galant, the defense minister of Israel, calling on him to avoid further escalation on the Lebanon border, which is truly amazing.
00:19:45.000Because if you want further escalation on the Lebanon border, tell Israel to back off.
00:19:50.000Hezbollah has already taken weakness as a sign that they should move forward, as always.
00:20:16.000And meanwhile, Tony Blinken is telling Israel it better be careful with that terrorist group in its north.
00:20:21.000As opposed to what the United States should be doing, which is going to the Lebanese government.
00:20:24.000Lebanon is an actual state with an actual government.
00:20:28.000The United States should be using its leverage to go to Beirut and tell them, hey listen guys, we can't control the Israelis.
00:20:33.000The Israelis are a separate government.
00:20:35.000And, um, you know, if they go, that's kind of your fault.
00:20:38.000You probably should get Hezbollah to pull up 10 miles from the border.
00:20:42.000But instead, the United States continues to put pressure on Israel in the benighted belief that somehow pressuring Western powers to cave to terrorists is a big win for the West in some way.
00:20:52.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:21:53.000According to the Times of Israel, Secretary of State Blinken urged Israel to take additional steps to protect humanitarian workers and ensure the delivery of aid throughout Gaza during his meeting with visiting Defense Minister Yoav Galant earlier today, according to the State Department.
00:22:06.000Apparently, the pair discussed ongoing efforts to secure a hostage ceasefire deal.
00:22:13.000Arab and Israeli officials said these were complicated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim on Sunday he was only interested in implementing part of the deal before resuming military operations in Gaza.
00:22:23.000Well, yes, because he wishes to extirpate Hamas.
00:22:26.000And this again goes to the weakness of the West.
00:22:30.000Richard Hanania has a very good column over to Substack talking about the weakness of the West when it comes to fighting terrorism.
00:22:37.000And he points out that there are a few different models of how exactly you fight evil ideologies.
00:22:42.000Because one of the big claims is that Israel can't defeat Hamas on an ideological level, that the more bombs you drop, the more people are radicalized.
00:22:49.000Hanania points out what he proclaims to be three different models of how you defeat an ideology.
00:22:55.000Model number one is what he calls the lose hope model.
00:22:59.000Which is that as the military crackdown grows greater, as it becomes clear that Israel is not going to cave, people lose hope and they realize that it turns out that their incessant hatred is not getting them anywhere.
00:23:10.000That, by the way, is the exact model that the United States pursued in, say, Germany or Japan during World War II.
00:23:16.000That's always funny when you hear commentators say, what, are you just gonna bomb your way and military your way to extirpating an ideology?
00:23:24.000Sometimes, actually, you have to do that.
00:23:26.000Or you have to militarily occupy an area.
00:23:29.000Or you have to completely rejigger the education system.
00:23:32.000It turns out, John, you know who understands this?
00:23:34.000John Fetterman, who's the weird hero of the moment.
00:23:37.000So Senator Fetterman did an interview with The New Yorker.
00:23:40.000He was asked by the New Yorker, quote, what he saw for the end of the war.
00:23:43.000Would it be Hamas's dismantling or something else?
00:23:45.000He said, I do think it's a fact that when you have that kind of an evil or that kind of a movement that came out of a society, whether it was Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or the Confederacy right here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed into submission.
00:23:57.000He says the kind of society that gave birth to it now has to reach a point where it has to turn its back to these kinds of uses and pursuits.
00:24:04.000So that'd be the quote-unquote lose hope model that Richard Hanania posits, and he is right.
00:24:08.000Then there's the linear model, which is that people don't really hate Israel all that much, it's just that when Israel gets mean, then they hate Israel more.
00:24:14.000Or they start off not hating Israel at all, and then Israel is mean, and then it just sort of extends.
00:24:18.000The fact of the matter is, people who generally hate the West, it does not have to do, at this point in history, with oppression.
00:24:26.000It has to do with a simple wish to exterminate the ideologies of the West.
00:24:32.000And the reality is that in, for example, Hamasistan in the Gaza Strip, in Judea and Samaria, the levels of support for terrorist groups are in the 75 to 90% range.
00:24:45.000Nothing Israel does is going to increase that because there's nowhere for it to increase to.
00:24:49.000And this happens to be true, again, in general, with regard to foreign policy.
00:24:52.000Weakness in the West is not what got rid of communism in the East.
00:24:56.000Weakness in the West is not what got rid of Nazism in the East, in Germany.
00:25:02.000It didn't get rid of imperial Shintoism in Japan.
00:25:08.000And yet the West continues to cave, cave and cave and cave, and subsidize its own destruction.
00:25:14.000So the United States has been one of the chief sponsors of the United Nations, of course, for 80 years at this point.
00:25:21.000And now there's a lawsuit against the UN Relief and Works Agency, which is a UN agency that is specifically designed for the Palestinians.
00:25:27.000And it basically is just a branch of Hamas at this point.
00:25:30.000Many of the people who work for the UNRWA actively work for Hamas.
00:25:33.000This is why you see weapons that are being hidden in UNRWA schools and hospitals.
00:25:38.000Well, now they're being sued by victims of October 7th.
00:25:42.000About a hundred Israeli plaintiffs are seeking unspecified financial damages.
00:25:45.000They claim the UNRWA is liable because it helped fund Hamas.
00:25:48.000They're actually claiming that about a billion dollars passed from the UNRWA through to Hamas employees.
00:25:56.000For years, the UNRWA sent millions of dollars every month to Gaza to pay employees and support hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure, according to a new lawsuit.
00:26:04.000That money was wired from New York to the West Bank, where financial institutions loaded some of that cash onto trucks to be driven to Gaza.
00:26:11.000In other words, you got to pay for that.
00:26:22.000One of the reasons why Donald Trump needs to be president of the United States again, because he does, on an innate level, understand that Western weakness breeds contempt.
00:27:40.000We're only a couple of days away from the debate.
00:27:42.000It is my view that Donald Trump should not have immediately accepted the Joe Biden offer to debate without actually negotiating over who the moderators would be.
00:27:48.000With that said, attacking the moderators is very often a popular debate strategy.
00:27:52.000And in this particular case, it'll be worth it.
00:28:55.000South America, Africa, and Asia as, quote, poisoning the blood of our country, which it's not hyperbole.
00:29:01.000That does very directly echo Adolf Hitler's language before World War II.
00:29:06.000If you were to open up a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf, you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as poisoning.
00:29:17.000There's really no other way to say it.
00:29:19.000Donald Trump's language mirrors this directly.
00:29:24.000Yeah, this is one of the moderators, obviously.
00:29:26.000Meanwhile, Dana Bash is the other moderator, so CNN's Casey Hunt had on Trump surrogate Carolyn Leavitt, and they had a bit of a fisticuffs.
00:29:34.000It broke out into a brawl, because Carolyn Leavitt pointed out these moderators are very much oriented against Donald Trump, and Casey Hunt got mad at this.
00:29:42.000So it takes someone five minutes to Google Jake Tapper, Donald Trump to see that Jake Tapper has... Ma'am, we're going to stop this interview if you're going to keep attacking my colleagues.
00:29:50.000Ma'am, I'm going to stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues.
00:29:55.000I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who you work for.
00:31:24.000Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google Jake Tapper, Donald Trump, to see that Jake Tapper has consistently- Ma'am, we're going to stop this interview if you're going to keep attacking my colleagues.
00:31:33.000Ma'am, I'm going to stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues.
00:31:38.000I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who you work for.
00:31:41.000I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past.
00:31:44.000Now, as for this debate, the expectation- We're going to come back out to the panel.
00:31:46.000Caroline, thank you very much for your time.
00:32:42.000Well, in a second, we're going to get to more on the actual debate, what's it going to be about, and where does the race stand first?
00:32:49.000This Thursday night, as you know, you have a unique opportunity to watch the presidential debate with commentary that actually makes sense.
00:33:15.000Eastern Time with a pre-show that will arm you with the context you need to cut through the political noise.
00:33:19.000During the debate, we'll break down every claim, every policy point, and yes, every leftist talking point the moderators inevitably slip in.
00:33:25.000And because we believe in giving you the full story, we're not stopping when the debate ends.
00:33:28.000Our post-show recap will dissect what all this means for the future of the country.
00:33:47.000Meanwhile, the debate prep is ongoing.
00:33:49.000Joe Biden, who has no time to do a press conference about violence against Jews across the country from members of his own party, And they're advocates.
00:33:56.000You know, like Jamal Bowman over in New York, where a big primary is taking place today.
00:33:59.000Again, if you are in New York's 16th congressional district, I urge you to go, if you can, vote in the primary, and vote for George Latimer, because Jamal Bowman is a trash heap.
00:34:08.000Well, Joe Biden is off in Camp David, presumably sleeping, eating Denny's, and prepping for debate.
00:34:14.000According to the New York Times, at Camp David, a movie theater and an airplane hangar have been outfitted with lights and production equipment to create a mock debate stage.
00:34:20.000So I guess that means that they have to actually recreate the debate optics so Joe Biden knows where he is when he steps on stage.
00:34:27.000At least 16 current and former aides at someone from Washington and Wilmington whiz back and forth on golf courts to join President Biden in strategy sessions.
00:34:34.000Biden is entering his fifth day of preparations at the presidential retreat in the woods of Northern Maryland for Thursday's debate against Donald Trump.
00:34:41.000Both candidates are out of practice as debaters.
00:34:43.000Biden's top advisors, including Ron Klain, are aware of the missteps incumbents have made in the past.
00:34:48.000They'll be working to position Biden not only as a president in the midst of a re-election campaign, but as a fighter who can counterpunch on the fly.
00:34:55.000The rust factor is real, said David Axelrod.
00:34:57.000Neither of these guys is accustomed to having someone a few feet away grilling them with no deference.
00:35:01.000They're trying to game out exactly which attacks Trump might launch at Biden, which policies of his Trump could try to undermine, how they can best keep the president focused on landing an argument and striking a character and policy contrast with Trump.
00:35:13.000Apparently, the person playing the role of Trump is Bob Bauer, Biden's personal attorney.
00:35:19.000The actual Trump has engaged in something that resembles a more streamlined debate preparation process than in past years.
00:35:24.000He's doing policy discussions, but he says that he's relying on his experiences as a campaigner to guide him when he takes the stage across from Biden.
00:35:32.000Trump, for his part, says that Joe Biden should certainly do a drug test, and he also tweeted out that he would do one as well.
00:35:40.000Can't find his way off the stage, can't put two sentences together, although he has agreed to debate, so I don't know, maybe they know something.
00:35:47.000He's going to be so jacked up for those debates, you watch.
00:35:53.000I just want to debate this guy, but, you know, and I'm going to demand a drug test too, by the way.
00:36:10.000I said, is that Joe up there, a beautiful rope?
00:36:13.000And by the end of the evening, he's like, well, it was exhausted, right?
00:36:17.000Now we're going to demand a drug test.
00:36:21.000So at least he's increasing expectations, which is the thing that he has to do.
00:36:27.000Donald Trump's big mistake in the run-up to this debate would be to lower the bar to Joe Biden to can he stay alive during the debate, as I've said many times.
00:36:36.000He will have drained the blood of a small child in the back room after sniffing her hair, and then he will be on stage, presumably half-awake.
00:36:43.000About 45 minutes in, he'll start to get a little drowsy.
00:36:46.000The biggest thing that Trump has to do is just point out policy failing after policy failing.
00:36:50.000And every time Biden tries to redirect to 2020 or 2021, Trump should just say to him, look Joe, I'm not obsessed with the past, but you are.
00:36:58.000Why can't we talk about your presidency?
00:38:01.000Roe vs. Wade just said that the Supreme Court would not prevent state laws on abortion because it's none of the federal government's business.
00:38:08.000Certainly not the judiciary under the Constitution of the United States.
00:38:11.000But here's Kamala Harris trying the abortion argument.
00:38:15.000Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, For his actions.
00:38:22.000Instead, he proudly takes credit for overturning Rome.
00:38:28.000My fellow Americans, in a court of law, that would be called an admission.
00:38:33.000In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty.
00:38:48.000So, Kamala Harris, bad vice presidential candidate, but this is their last gasp.
00:38:53.000Apparently, Joe Biden also thinks this.
00:38:54.000He is tweeting incessantly about Roe versus Wade today.
00:39:34.000Meanwhile, in other news, Julian Assange has apparently now cut a plea deal.
00:39:38.000So Julian Assange is the WikiLeaks founder.
00:39:40.000You remember that he had been prosecuted years ago.
00:39:44.000He's been in a wide variety of legal battles for a long time because WikiLeaks is effectively a laundering operation on behalf of those who violate classified information laws in the United States.
00:39:55.000The question was, how do you actually prosecute Assange?
00:40:00.000I think that Assange does not have the interests of the United States at heart or the interests of the West at heart generally.
00:40:06.000I think that many of the things he has done have effectively helped places like Russia and China?
00:40:11.000The question about the prosecution of Assange is sort of a different one.
00:40:14.000And that is, on what legal basis do you prosecute Assange?
00:40:16.000Because there are a lot of journalists who have published classified information before.
00:40:19.000Does this immediately make them liable for criminal activity?
00:40:22.000The way the federal government has tried to get around that is by suggesting that Assange himself tried to supply passwords to Chelsea Manning.
00:40:32.000Who was breaking into classified information, then supplying it unredacted to Julian Assange, who's releasing a lot of it unredacted, damaging the United States, putting American assets at risk abroad.
00:40:44.000So the attempt to go after Assange was based on the idea that he was actively facilitating the leaking of the classified information.
00:40:49.000He wasn't just sort of a passive recipient of it.
00:40:54.000But now, he has cut a deal to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act in exchange for a five-year prison sentence.
00:41:01.000Under the agreement, he'll be freed, having already served that time while in British custody.
00:41:05.000The deal brings an abrupt end to an extraordinary legal saga, according to the New York Times, that has raised novel issues of national security, press freedom, politics, and diplomacy.
00:41:13.000Apparently, he is going to settle down in Australia at this point.
00:41:17.000A lot of people on the right are very upset at Joe Biden for having cut this deal, and his DOJ for having cut this deal.
00:41:25.000WikiLeaks said Assange was granted bail by a UK court on Monday and then boarded a plane at London's Stansted Airport and left the UK.
00:41:33.000So again, if so, another aspect of weakness from Joe Biden, obviously, if you're worried about the leaking of classified material.
00:41:42.000He's been a controversial figure for a very, very long time.
00:41:48.000You know, two things can be true at once, as always.
00:41:51.000You want answerability for the American government.
00:41:55.000You want the American government to hold itself to particular standards.
00:41:58.000Also, there does have to be classified information in national security, or it does put American soldiers and assets abroad at risk.
00:42:04.000Julian Assange violated all of those precepts.
00:42:10.000The deal brings to a sort of quiet ending a very, very long legal saga.
00:42:15.000But he is now free and he will apparently head on over to Australia to, I assume, go back to leaking American national security secrets.
00:42:24.000So we'll see how that works out for the United States.
00:42:26.000Meanwhile, speaking of the administrative state, a shocking story today broken by Jesse Singel over to Substack.
00:42:33.000This is not even remotely a right-wing source.
00:42:36.000Jesse is center-left on virtually all of his politics.
00:42:40.000He reports today, when the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's Standards of Care version 8 was released in September 2022, a very strange thing happened.
00:42:49.000WPATH removed references to minimum age requirements for various medical interventions, describing the changes as a correction in a notice that now reads weirdly, this correction notice has been removed, as it referred to a previous version of this article, which was published in error.
00:43:02.000The SOC 8 was supposed to have been created via something called the Delphi process, But thanks to a rather remarkable document just unsealed, one of the many American lawsuits over youth gender medicine in this lawsuit, we now have a potential explanation for why the age guidelines were removed.
00:43:17.000Direct pressure from Assistant Secretary for Health of the Department of Health and Human Services, wait for it, Admiral Rachel Levine.
00:43:23.000The document is titled Appendix A to Supplemental Expert Report of James Cantor, Ph.D.
00:43:28.000In it, Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher, critic of youth gender medicine, and frequent expert witness on behalf of those attempting to ban or restrict it, claims, quote, Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Rachel Levine, strongly pressured WPATH leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOCH-8 in order to assist with administration political strategy.
00:43:47.000And then there are a bunch of documents that are included in the legal filing, including A document that says, quote, I've just spoken to Admiral Levine today, who, as always, is extremely supportive of the SOC-8, but is very eager for its release so as to ensure integration in the US health policies of the Biden administration.
00:44:07.000Levine decided to ignore all the science and suggest that transgender quote-unquote medicine is totally good and decided to launder that into the WPATH report so it could be reverse adopted by the United States government.
00:44:19.000You wonder why so many people don't trust the experts or to science?
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00:45:44.000Meanwhile, in accordance with the Biden administration plan to greatly weaken America, China continues to get stronger.
00:45:49.000According to the Wall Street Journal, there's a new space race, this time between the United States and China.
00:45:53.000On Tuesday, China took an important step forward.
00:45:55.000A Chinese spacecraft touched down on the grasslands in China's Inner Mongolia region, carrying the first ever rock samples from the far side of the moon.
00:46:02.000A scientific breakthrough in itself, the success also advanced China's plans to put astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a lunar base by 2035.
00:46:09.000Such momentum is worrying American space officials and lawmakers who have their own ambitions to build moon bases.
00:46:15.000The goal now is to build permanent human outposts on the most strategic locations on the moon, the lunar south pole.
00:46:22.000officials fear China is planning a land grab on the moon.
00:46:24.000Remember that time that Newt Gingrich was laughed out of court for suggesting that we ought to go ahead and do this?
00:46:29.000Well, China is just going ahead with it.
00:46:32.000The Biden administration, meanwhile, is laser focused on trying to build internet boxes that don't work in the United States.
00:46:38.000The beauty of being a tyranny is that you can mobilize enormous resources for specific projects, That's particularly true in the face of an America that is distracted by stupidity.
00:46:49.000Also, China is apparently undermining America's diplomatic efforts, of course.
00:46:53.000According to the Wall Street Journal, in November last year, President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to boost engagement between ordinary Chinese and Americans.
00:46:59.000Instead, says Nicholas Burns, Washington's ambassador in Beijing, China has actively undermined those ties, interrogating and intimidating citizens who attend U.S.-organized events in China, ramping up restrictions on the embassy's social media posts, whipping up anti-American sentiment.
00:47:13.000Burns said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Burns also took aim at Beijing for what he described as efforts to stir up anti-American sentiment domestically, saying he was particularly concerned about the recent stabbing of four Iowa college instructors in northeastern China.
00:47:34.000and China appear to be stabilizing after a November summit in San Francisco between Xi and Biden.
00:47:39.000Secretary of State Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, all these people are going to China.
00:47:43.000But when we talk stabilization under Joe Biden, understand that just means concession.
00:47:48.000And under the surface, China is just doing what it can in aggressive fashion.
00:47:52.000Burns has tallied 61 public events since November in which China's Ministry of State Security or other government bodies pressured Chinese citizens not to go to American diplomatic activities in China or attempted to intimidate those who did attend.
00:48:06.000Beijing is also making it harder for Chinese students to attend US universities.
00:48:10.000Roughly half of participants chosen for U.S.
00:48:12.000funded exchange programs have pulled out over the past couple of years.
00:48:21.000And China is getting aggressive every day, as it has to, because again, their window is closing.
00:48:26.000The thing is that in the long run, that means that China will be weak.
00:48:29.000But in the short run, it means they have to get very aggressive very quickly.
00:48:31.000And you see Xi Jinping moving toward doing that sort of thing.
00:48:35.000So the United States in the long term has tremendous advantages over China, but China in the short term better move quickly or their window of opportunity closes.
00:48:43.000Alrighty folks, in just a second we're going to jump into the vaunted Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag, but you can only access that if you're a member.
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