In this episode, I discuss rare earth minerals and the recent diplomatic initiative by President Trump to secure access to rare earths, and why this is a good thing. I also discuss the Routh case and why I think it shows why a president who sees the big picture is better than one who only looks ahead.
00:00:30.000Well, one place that the United States fell very far behind under Joe Biden and before him, Barack Obama, was in rare earth minerals.
00:00:41.500Now, rare earth minerals are, of course, mined around the world. There's two kinds. There's soft, rare earth minerals. Those are required to make things like cell phones or toasters or other personal electronic devices.
00:00:58.300And then there are hard rare earth minerals. We need them to make airplanes, fighter jets, tanks and so on.
00:01:06.620The Communist Chinese had had very, very aggressively gotten control of most about 80 percent of the world's rare earth minerals in South America, Central America, Asia, even parts of Eastern Europe.0.88
00:01:25.800Donald Trump has recognized this great danger and he's put together a rare earth minerals working group within his administration just this past week.
00:01:36.480On the fourth, the United States convened a ministerial level summit of critical mineral producing companies, including a number of prominent African countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Guinea among them.
00:01:52.320That meeting actually reflects Washington's growing determination to secure access to resources that have really become indispensable to any modern economy necessary for advanced manufacturing and high technology industries.
00:02:08.480This diplomatic move by Trump illustrates, I think, a broader calibration of both U.S. policy of engagement with Africa, increasingly shaped by resource security, industrial policy and geostrategic competition, particularly, of course, with China.
00:02:27.460Critical minerals, however, are at the core of President Trump's U.S. strategic planning.
00:02:33.640Following recent diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East, Washington now seems to be moving more decisively on the issue of critical rare earth minerals, a dominion where global power balances are very rapidly, thank God, shifting.
00:02:48.340The Trump administration has made it clear that restoring U.S. centrality to strategic supply chains is a priority, not just for economic competitiveness, but also for the national security and technological sovereignty.
00:03:03.780Critical minerals, things like cobalt, things like cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements like bauxite and graphite, minerals like potash, these are all essential for semiconductors and advanced electronics, electric vehicles, battery storage, renewable energy infrastructure.
00:03:23.020And then there's the hard rare earth minerals needed for aerospace and defense systems.
00:03:28.480Africa, interestingly, is home to some of the world's largest reserves of these resources, occupies a pivotal position in this strategic equation.
00:03:39.120So Washington's message really is security, technology and energy resilience.
00:03:44.180The U.S. Department of State under Marco Rubio announced this meeting on the 4th via its official communication channels,
00:03:53.100indicating that Secretary Ruby would host partners from around the world for discussions focused on critical rare earth minerals.
00:04:02.240According to a statement put out, strengthening critical mineral supply chains with international partners is now essential for U.S. economic and national security for technological leadership in a, well, a resilient energy future.
00:04:16.820This framing underscores the extent now to which mineral policy has become intertwined with defense planning, industrial competitiveness, and energy transition strategies.
00:04:30.160The inclusion of these African producers confirms that Washington views the continent not merely as a source of raw materials,
00:04:38.160but now as a strategic arena in the restructuring of all of these global supply networks.
00:04:45.320Africa is playing a central role and has strategic leverage.
00:04:50.220The participants, I read there's a list of 14, but specifically the Dominican Republic of Congo, where President Trump recently ended a war, a long, bloody war with Rwanda, Guinea, and Kenya, among them, particularly significant.
00:05:07.020The DRC remains, that's the Congo, remains the world's leading producer of cobalt, Guinea, holds vast bauxite reserves, critical for aluminum production, and Kenya is positioning itself within regional value chains linked to energy transition minerals.
00:05:26.260So this is a big move for the Trump administration.
00:05:31.260It also shows why it's nice to have a president who sees the big picture and a president who looks ahead.
00:05:38.260It's always baffled me which president thought it was a good idea to have all of our most important pharmaceutical drugs, things like amoxicillin, for example, made in China.
00:05:56.740That seems to me like bad public policy.
00:06:01.320President Trump has moved very aggressively to build the national stockpiles of some of these really crucial pharmaceutical drugs.
00:06:09.580Once again, it's nice to have a president, well, who thinks about the big picture and looks ahead.
00:06:16.000A president who puts America first, not profit first.
00:06:19.940In the meantime, Ryan Routh, he was the mentally deranged leftist convicted of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf club in West Palm Beach during the 2024 campaign.
00:06:33.700He's been sentenced to life in prison, plus an additional 84 months.
00:06:37.880This verdict sends a strong message that political violence will not be tolerated in the United States.
00:06:59.820Routh was found guilty of attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, multiple firearms violations and assaulting a federal officer.
00:07:09.920Jurors deliberated for just two and a half hours before reaching their decision, a reflection of the overwhelming evidence of Routh's guilt that was presented at trial.
00:07:21.240It was very disturbing when the verdict was read.
00:07:24.640Routh attempted to stab himself with the pen unsuccessfully.
00:07:28.900There's still a lot of questions here that remain, which is Routh, who they tell us was indigent, who allegedly lived in Hawaii, was behind in his rent, was behind in his alimony payments.
00:07:41.440Yet we saw video of him in a number of European capitals where he was out recruiting mercenaries to fight the Russians in Ukraine.
00:07:51.560So who was paying for Mr. Routh's travel in this period in which we're told he's Indian?
00:07:58.440He had a very elaborate website for recruiting mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.
00:08:06.280Who paid for the construction of that website?
00:08:12.440I actually met an evangelical pastor who ran into Routh on Maiden Square in Ukraine when he was there with a prayer group and got into an argument with him.
00:08:25.820So he smells like a CIA operative to me.
00:08:53.840These are all questions we still don't know.
00:08:56.400I still have questions, of course, about what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania.
00:09:00.840But in this case, authorities say that Ralph hid in the shrubbery near Trump International Golf Club in Florida back in September 15th, it was, of 2024,
00:09:11.180aiming a rifle towards the course while Trump played nearby.
00:09:14.500Ralph later claimed incredulously that he was only guilty of caring too much, arguing that possessing a weapon did not improve his intent to kill.
00:09:25.260He waited, actually, in the shrubbery for hours for Donald Trump to play through.
00:09:30.600These arguments didn't carry much weight with the jury, evidently.
00:09:33.860Even more chilling were letters that Ralph wrote to the judge questioning why he wasn't eligible for the death penalty and suggested that he be traded to hostile regimes like China, Iran, or North Korea.
00:09:47.680Even though the killer was deranged, or he was perhaps acting deranged, it was clear that Ralph knew exactly what he was attempting to do.
00:09:56.380There are many thousands of these leftist sleeper cells waiting to be activated, unfortunately, throughout our country after being subjected to two years of both dehumanizing propaganda about President Trump and his supporters.
00:10:10.700And, of course, the open borders policy of Joe Biden, which left 30,000 people into the country, at least 30,000, according to people I respect.
00:10:20.820We know that 217 of them are identified as terrorists.
00:10:26.740I venture that the number of known terrorists is far higher, or perhaps I should say the number of unknown terrorists.
00:10:36.340Media propagandists ought to be considered accomplices in Ralph's plot to assassinate the president because they're the ones who sought to destroy Trump,
00:10:46.880calling him a dictator, calling him a dictator, comparing him to Hitler.
00:10:51.460This is one of Stone's most important rules.
00:10:53.620If you're in a political debate and your opponent invokes the name of Adolf Hitler, that almost always means they're losing the debate.
00:11:02.980Those who are the authoritarians, those who wanted to keep Trump off the ballot,
00:11:07.460Those who wanted to censor anyone in the country who questioned the 2020 election or who questioned the safety and the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccination or questioned whether Hunter Biden's laptop was authentic or whether it was Russian disinformation.
00:11:28.140The people who want to censor you, the people who want to censor you, they are the authoritarians.
00:11:34.140The people who don't want your candidate to appear on the ballot, they are the ones who are the authoritarians.
00:11:41.680This is a great technique of the left.
00:11:45.160There's a book called Alinsky's Rules.
00:11:47.840It was written by a famous communist agitator named Saul Alinsky.
00:11:52.300Alinsky said that you should always blame your opponents, or in this case, your enemies, with doing exactly what you yourself are doing.
00:12:04.140There's no greater example of this than when we try to examine whether those who are responsible for the Russian collusion hoax,
00:12:13.340There's two phony impeachments, the theft of the 2020 election, which I'm convinced the proof of which we're going to see publicly quite soon.
00:12:41.640And then, of course, the extra-constitutional Arctic Frost investigation, in which Jack Smith tried to make questioning the outcome of an election a federal crime,
00:12:55.620tried to make the formation of alternative elector slates in the states where there are legal disputes about the outcome of the presidential election a crime.