The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 28, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE: Realpolitik #57 | Can You Solve This Peacefully?


Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

132.0

Word count

3,075

Sentence count

94

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, good afternoon. This is another episode of RealPolitik, and I am your host, Firas Maudad.
00:00:07.680 Today I want to talk a little bit about the United States, and I just want to share some
00:00:13.220 thoughts with you because it seems to me that the choice the Americans are facing is really
00:00:19.100 between civil war and tyranny, and I'll go through it and try to explain it. If you try to think
00:00:26.240 about the main problems facing the United States. The number one issue obviously is immigration,
00:00:32.060 the transformation of the country that has been happening for decades now with the introduction
00:00:38.960 of new immigration laws that gradually opened up the states to the entire world and fundamentally 0.58
00:00:46.260 changed its character to the extent that now most major American cities have Hindu festivals,
00:00:52.620 let alone the at least Christian, Mexican, and other events.
00:00:59.180 Second thing to think about is the loss of Christian identity that's happening in the States.
00:01:04.300 The country is becoming increasingly secularized.
00:01:08.440 The secularists obviously don't reproduce as much, but they do manage to convert people to their side.
00:01:16.000 The third issue is foreign influence and the extent to which special interest groups can influence American policy.
00:01:26.100 The fourth really is the oligarchic takeover and the concentration of technological powers in the hands of a small elite that doesn't really wish the United States a lot of good.
00:01:38.300 And really, it all boils down to some kind of loss of confidence that the Americans are experiencing.
00:01:43.920 they don't seem to trust themselves as much they seem to have lost their way really let's start by
00:01:54.640 thinking about what's happening with these topics and what the administration has been doing about
00:01:59.120 them now on immigration one good thing that the trump admin did do was basically impose a hundred
00:02:07.420 thousand dollars on every new h1b visa they didn't do anything to revoke the older visas
00:02:13.500 they did some tinkering on the edges stranded a bunch of indians in india uh but not really
00:02:20.280 transformative and they went ahead with a big expansion of the h2b visas from around 120 000
00:02:29.020 to add another 60 70 000 new migrants which in the grand scheme of things isn't as big
00:02:36.880 But what we've seen in the past is that when these doors open, they slowly open wider and wider, and they almost never close.
00:02:46.120 And with the deportations, it's really been a big failure.
00:02:51.960 The official data is there's maybe something like 350,000 people deported.
00:02:58.320 By contrast, Joe Biden might have brought in anything between 10 and 15 million new people into the United States, which now, after the ruling from the Supreme Court, can all basically give birth to new American citizens, regardless of their legal status.
00:03:17.540 and the Supreme Court completely failed to put an end to the naturalization of the second 0.50
00:03:26.660 generation of illegal migrants and to birth tourism. And just as a quick example, from my
00:03:32.500 tiny neck of the woods in Lebanon, there's a couple of dozen people at least in a tiny village
00:03:38.460 in the middle of nowhere who I know of, who already have American citizenship because of
00:03:45.660 this kind of birth tourism. And it's just so widespread, you wouldn't even believe it. You
00:03:51.780 don't know what to do about it. And when it comes to the demographic picture, well, the white births 0.84
00:03:59.500 in the United States are actually a minority of all births. They're around 49% of all live births
00:04:06.480 are to white Americans. And not to be more racist than usual or anything like that, but this is
00:04:13.360 important, because the United States is only recognizable as a people, and that people has a
00:04:20.800 European and predominantly Anglo background, and it's that cultural heritage that makes the United
00:04:28.600 States what it is. If it had stayed, if it ended up being Spanish or French or German or Russian,
00:04:37.200 it wouldn't be recognizable, let alone if it turned out to be, I don't know, Indian or Arab
00:04:45.360 or any other group or just a very mixed group. So when you look at the demographics of the United
00:04:52.360 States, white Americans are a minority in the coming generation. They are a minority of births
00:04:59.100 as of last year. And the idea that this doesn't have a transformative effect
00:05:05.200 is simply laughable. I mean, I don't want to preach to the choir, you probably all agree with me,
00:05:11.120 but this is a stark reality. And what we've seen on the left is this coalition of different racial
00:05:19.560 groups that is primarily aimed at destroying the Anglo and Christian culture of the United States. 0.91
00:05:27.780 um even the hispanics probably more than half of them are in one way or another white or whitish
00:05:36.200 but that's not how they view themselves they view themselves as fundamentally in conflict with the
00:05:42.820 anglos and so the demographic change that's happened in the united states is pretty catastrophic
00:05:48.380 really and when it comes to the loss of christian identity the trump administration has taken some
00:05:54.560 actions over this issue they've tried to basically set up a religious liberty board and the first
00:06:02.200 thing that they did was kick out some catholic influencer who said that she didn't like israel
00:06:07.660 they published reports on how religious liberty is being restricted but they didn't end up doing
00:06:15.520 something that is substantial on it all they ended up doing was impose some rule changes
00:06:20.220 for the federal agencies that run the American Civil Service
00:06:26.100 and tell them you have to be a little bit more inclusive
00:06:29.260 of people's religious practices
00:06:32.060 and you can't in any way openly discriminate against Christians.
00:06:36.720 The problem with that is that if you look at the quality of judges
00:06:40.760 that were appointed under Biden, for example,
00:06:44.100 these judges will absolutely and always side
00:06:47.840 with religious restrictions on Christians. 0.98
00:06:50.220 They will always do it. 1.00
00:06:52.260 And since the changes happened only to regulations, not even to laws,
00:06:58.900 it's very difficult to see how this doesn't end up in effect happening,
00:07:03.920 because not everybody can fight and take their case to the Supreme Court.
00:07:09.220 It's impossible to do that.
00:07:11.040 And we saw under the Biden administration all kinds of additional pressures on Christians,
00:07:15.760 going and locking up people for protesting, for praying outside abortion clinics, things like that,
00:07:23.540 trying to say that if you oppose transgenderism or same-sex marriage, that means that you're out
00:07:30.920 or that you're going to be losing your job. We've seen this kind of thing happen in the public
00:07:38.040 services in the United States, but more importantly, we've seen it happen through corporations,
00:07:43.120 because pretty much every corporation in the United States has some kind of clause that says
00:07:48.200 you will be dismissed if you bring the company into disrepute. And if you say, well, I'm a
00:07:54.980 traditional Christian, I oppose your progressive ideology, that means that you're bringing the
00:08:00.180 company into disrepute and that's it. They can kick you out and destroy your livelihood. And
00:08:04.880 there's nothing that can change that other than very severe action from the executive
00:08:10.860 against these kinds of corporations
00:08:13.940 that is intended to bring them back into line.
00:08:18.720 And as we had been discussing earlier on the podcast,
00:08:23.140 the left is animated by cult-like beliefs.
00:08:26.860 It is, in fact, a cult.
00:08:28.860 They have their own version of religion
00:08:31.280 in which, essentially, salvation comes from the mass integration
00:08:37.160 where everybody holds hands together and sings Kumbaya,
00:08:41.740 including with the trans and the gays and the minorities
00:08:45.700 and the different religions and so on and so forth, 0.89
00:08:49.060 so long as white Christians are excluded or are given second-class citizenship. 0.73
00:08:55.140 And that's the entire purpose of the whole arrangement with DEI.
00:08:59.120 And that arrangement with DEI is being pushed
00:09:02.560 by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street
00:09:06.560 which together control around 73% of all exchange-traded funds.
00:09:12.920 Now, exchange-traded funds are basically funds that follow the index, so to speak.
00:09:20.820 They can be any range of things.
00:09:25.440 But exchange-traded funds are a way to hold equity indirectly through asset managers.
00:09:32.860 And these three asset managers, on their own, control 75% of the market.
00:09:41.260 And that makes them a massive target for some kind of anti-monopoly enforcement action.
00:09:49.740 But the American government chooses not to take action against them, even under Trump.
00:09:55.120 It chooses not to break up the entrenched financial power of the far left,
00:09:59.560 which is inseparable from the banking sector
00:10:02.220 and from these asset managers in particular
00:10:04.340 and especially those three
00:10:07.480 especially BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street
00:10:11.000 instead of moving against them
00:10:14.480 and dismantling the institutional power that they hold
00:10:17.280 and saying that they are engaged in anti-competitive practices
00:10:21.620 and that therefore they should be broken up
00:10:24.980 in the same way that back in the old days
00:10:27.400 standard oil was broken up
00:10:28.840 the trump administration sits on the sidelines and does nothing to actually break their
00:10:35.740 institutional power and this matters because they end up donating primarily to democrats
00:10:42.080 and they end up donating primarily to funds that further the democratic cause of further
00:10:50.400 disenfranchising the people who actually built the united states the people whose ancestors
00:10:56.720 built the United States, that is to say, white Americans. 0.62
00:11:03.700 This is the focus of American politics right now, institutionally speaking.
00:11:09.440 And all the administration seems to be able to do is take some kind of very weak,
00:11:14.760 rear guard action against it without any real conviction.
00:11:20.460 And on the religion front, I mean, you know, this is who Trump chose to be his faith leader, Paula White Cain. 1.00
00:11:34.580 And she basically is a bit of a lunatic. 0.99
00:11:40.560 I don't know any other way of describing it. 0.99
00:11:43.380 She believes she had a vision of heaven.
00:11:47.560 uh she's militantly pro-israel she's been in all kinds of relationships as far as i can say
00:11:57.660 um and this is who's leading the faith campaign for the united states when what you actually need
00:12:05.620 is basically a commitment to proper religiosity centralized and strengthened and then you look 0.82
00:12:14.040 at the protestants and they're all broken apart and in chaos and you look at the catholics
00:12:18.500 and my god the catholic church in the united states is woke american bishops are so woke
00:12:25.340 so the idea of having a sense of justice of being willing to fight back of willing
00:12:30.800 to re-christianize the country that's not happening demographically it's going in a in
00:12:37.820 an incredibly negative direction, in a direction that simply cannot really work, and in a direction
00:12:45.180 that furthers the American loss of identity, and with it, the American loss of confidence.
00:12:52.740 And then you've got the oligarchic takeover of the United States.
00:12:56.800 I mean, when you look at it, basically, it seems a bit hopeless, shall we say.
00:13:10.620 Trump had the whole thing about ending the corruption, draining the swamp, all of that kind of stuff.
00:13:18.320 But then when you see what's actually going on,
00:13:22.020 And people who are involved in the administration are taking hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to push further lobbying. Biden had actually made an ethics pledge saying that, you know, if you leave the executive branch, you need to be out of it for two years before you lobby your former agencies, the people who used to work for.
00:13:46.540 Trump, at some point, was saying it should be five years,
00:13:49.940 but then he takes office and he just sort of, you know, completely destroys it
00:13:55.700 and allows anybody with money to buy access to the administration.
00:14:02.220 And you can sort of see how Trump has basically been broken in.
00:14:07.180 I don't know if it was the assassination attempts.
00:14:10.200 I don't know if it was the pressure.
00:14:12.040 but now the main focus of Trump and the people around him
00:14:17.000 is to just make as much money as possible
00:14:19.120 which again furthers the idea that there is zero confidence
00:14:24.380 in what he is doing and what he is trying to achieve
00:14:26.940 and it doesn't really bode well at all
00:14:31.300 they are breaking records in terms of how much money
00:14:39.500 is being given to lobbyists in order to influence trump they're breaking incredible records
00:14:47.200 uh five billion dollars for the first time it's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things
00:14:53.680 but you know divided over a few contested congressional seats which is all there is
00:15:00.600 because most congressional seats are safe for one party or the other there's also there's only like
00:15:06.060 100 out of the 500 that's actively, regularly contested, and you see this money going in to
00:15:14.340 try to influence the administration, and all that it does is pretty much confirm that everything in
00:15:21.500 the United States is bought and paid for, that there isn't going to be any action against the
00:15:28.080 oligarchic classes that actually decide everything in the United States. And this is a problem,
00:15:35.080 because it fundamentally alters the democratic system.
00:15:40.900 I would argue that the problem is democracy itself
00:15:44.420 because it can never work in the long term
00:15:46.620 and over time it just becomes cover for oligarchy.
00:15:51.020 And eventually that oligarchy turns into tyranny
00:15:55.560 and the only way to overthrow that tyranny becomes violence.
00:16:00.500 The great promise of Trump was basically
00:16:03.460 that he was going to drain the swamp and end this kind of corruption
00:16:07.920 that happens via lobbying, which is legal,
00:16:11.200 and that happens via the revolving door,
00:16:13.800 as in you work at a government agency,
00:16:15.940 then you work for a private company,
00:16:17.940 then you go back to the government agency.
00:16:20.440 All the time, the interests that you're actually serving
00:16:23.560 are the private employers who can pay you far more than the government.
00:16:30.880 Trump decided not to do anything on that.
00:16:32.800 He decided to give up on it, and he decided to make his own money from it and to help his administration make money from it.
00:16:41.760 And that goes to show you that the system has become so pervasive, so captured, that it can no longer be broken via the normal political methods.
00:16:59.280 That's essentially what it shows you.
00:17:01.080 and everybody around trump is just making money on this pretty much everybody is is making a
00:17:08.860 killing on this the banks are obviously spending a huge amount of money but that's mainly in order
00:17:15.140 to fight against the crypto bros and the crypto thing looks really like a scam so you've got
00:17:23.040 usurers and scammers fighting each other for influence busily trying to buy votes and very
00:17:30.260 little in the way of things that are actually productive in the way of things that actually
00:17:36.820 produce real tangible items refrigerators televisions computers cars airplanes
00:17:46.340 these are not the guys with influence the united states and for the most part these manufacturers
00:17:52.740 themselves are enormously influenced by the asset managers like BlackRock and
00:18:00.480 State Street and Vanguard, these are the three biggest ones, who hold big chunks
00:18:06.480 of their shares, almost never majorities, almost never majorities, but big enough to
00:18:13.140 make them the loudest voice that everybody has to heed. And these guys
00:18:18.780 have an agenda and an ideology and they keep on pushing uh esg with the objective of
00:18:30.060 woke-ifying the entirety of the corporate world at a time when the entirety of the
00:18:36.220 academic world has been entirely woke-ified and this really matters because it is from there that
00:18:43.900 the ideas and the industry come. There is this take on the right that you should just
00:18:51.940 teach your kid to be a plumber. No, no. There's nothing wrong with being a plumber,
00:18:58.760 but if you can join the elite, you should and you must reach the highest levels of attainment
00:19:06.240 in order to join the elite. But the institutions that form the elites and that give them their
00:19:13.500 career opportunities have all been pushed towards this extremist ideology that denies the role of
00:19:21.900 the nation and the role of religion in shaping the values of the nation. And this can't hold on
00:19:30.140 forever. This can't work forever, especially because it is the people who are white and 1.00
00:19:37.080 religious who overwhelmingly joined the American armed forces, who are the guys who are most
00:19:42.460 willing to fight for the United States. So there is this massive cleavage in between the values of
00:19:50.180 the elites that have been shaped over the last few decades and the institutions that control
00:19:56.900 the large corporations that are absolutely necessary in a country the size of the United
00:20:03.120 States and the people who fight to keep the system where it is. There is this huge gap in values and
00:20:11.160 there is no reasonable way of bridging it. It is impossible to convince the left of anything
00:20:18.520 because their actual objective, for example, in things like ESG, is to find ways of destroying
00:20:27.700 you. That is their aim. That is what they're after. ESG, for those of you who don't know or
00:20:34.880 don't remember environmental social governance these are scores and i briefly worked tangentially
00:20:43.800 around these things uh in a former life and you rate every single company and every single policy
00:20:50.780 on things like are they green enough are they committed to cart cutting their carbon footprint
00:20:56.880 Do they give marriage benefits to same-sex couples? Do they have a trans inclusion policy?
00:21:06.040 Do they have a DEI policy? Do they have a pro-migrant policy? Do they have policies
00:21:12.920 essentially that discriminate against straight white men? And so this is being forced on all
00:21:18.700 of society by the academic institutions and by the media and by the financial institutions
00:21:25.320 that have an enormous amount of influence
00:21:28.860 over every single corporation
00:21:31.320 that is listed on a stock exchange.
00:21:34.700 And if your company gets big enough
00:21:36.600 and you want to take it to the next level,
00:21:40.000 you have to list on a stock exchange
00:21:41.960 because that is how you raise capital.
00:21:44.660 Meaning that if you are a successful entrepreneur
00:21:48.260 and you build a company that can go global,
00:21:52.680 or at least in the United States, national and then global,
00:21:56.760 you have to be subservient to the ideology of people like Larry Fink,
00:22:01.960 the CEO of BlackRock, 0.84
00:22:03.980 and you have to embrace his values on transgenderism
00:22:09.520 and environmentalism and immigration and so on and so forth
00:22:14.160 for you to be able to build your company up.
00:22:17.780 which is important because if you want to succeed and then you want to lobby congress
00:22:26.720 in the opposite direction you can't succeed unless you sell your soul if you enjoyed this
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00:22:47.780 Thank you.