00:02:27.000Today, the Guardian is reporting today that the Middle East crisis is getting out of control.
00:02:34.000The Houthis have been attacking ships that are in the Red Sea.
00:02:37.000You've got Iran that are going after ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:02:41.000This is a big problem, clearly, and it's led the Saudis to be concerned with getting nuclear weapons, which is something that the U.S. has been trying to avoid.
00:02:49.000But apparently, the U.S. approved it, and now the deal might be in limbo or the U.S. might not be approving it.
00:03:04.000Now, the NDAA is something the government passes every year because it's the National Defense Authorization Act.
00:03:10.000This particular year, there is a provision in the NDAA that has some kind of merging of U.S. intel and military with the Israeli intel and military.
00:03:23.000This is a problem for a lot of people, and so we're going to discuss that.
00:03:28.000Rand Paul has told, or has, has, Put up a website, I guess, that has a bunch more information about COVID and the leaks and the lab leak theory.
00:03:38.000I guess Dr. Fauci is now in more hot water, allegedly in more hot water.
00:04:08.000So, OpenAI is facing litigation over this.
00:04:11.000AI is going to be something that is going to be in our lives, and we're going to talk about the ramifications for that.
00:04:17.000So, but before we get into any and all of that stuff, we want you to head on over to Bunker Branding and go ahead and pick up some Timcast merch.
00:04:25.000There's right now we're showing you Ian's Betrayal.
00:04:28.000It's a bunch of the people from the Timcast crew.
00:04:30.000I'm over here in the back shooting at Ian.
00:04:33.000I mean, you've all seen me talk to Ian, and you know that I would never.
00:04:38.000Ever harm Ian because he's a wonderful person.
00:04:41.000Um, but head on over to Bunker Bunker Branding.
00:04:43.000Also, head on over to rumble.com so you can join us for the after show.
00:04:48.000Head on over to timcast.com where you can join our Discord and call in to the after show.
00:04:54.000But joining us tonight to talk about all of the things that we mentioned, Mike Benz.
00:06:07.000From Dubai, U.S. President Donald Trump promised on Thursday major military punishment for Iran and its Houthi allies after the Yemeni fighters struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, extending the Middle East war to a second major shipping choke point.
00:06:20.000Fears that disruption could widen further to block another sea route sent global prices surging in one of the steepest rises of the war.
00:06:27.000Brent crude rose more than 6%, breaking through $100 of ale for the first time since May.
00:06:32.000Two weeks into the effective collapse of an interim truce meant to end the war, the U.S. military launched another round of airstrikes on Iran overnight into Thursday, prompting Iran to fire at neighboring Arab countries that house U.S. bases.
00:06:43.000Iranian state media said a missile struck Kushem Island on the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday evening, raising the prospect of further night attacks.
00:06:50.000In a conflict well into its fifth month that has already killed thousands and raised fears of a global economic downturn.
00:06:58.000The Houthis getting involved in this and going after the Red Sea, it really is an escalation that could cause significant problems to the economy.
00:07:08.000The U.S. had really kind of had basically oil shipping and prices relatively managed, especially considering the predictions in February and April.
00:07:22.000People were talking about $200 a gallon or $200 a barrel.
00:07:25.000Oil and the price of gas was going to go through the roof.
00:07:29.000And it seemed like, as long as the conflict stayed in the Strait of Hormuz and between Iran and the U.S., that seemed like that was going to be kind of the same.
00:07:39.000But the Houthis getting involved now, going after the Red Sea, making sure that the problem escalates further across the region, is something that is likely to continue to drive up oil prices.
00:07:52.000And it's going to be something that's going to make an already generally unpopular war very unpopular with the American people if the price of gas.
00:08:03.000I mean, the second front being opened is obviously going to cause a lot of headaches.
00:08:11.000One of the things that brought the price of oil down was the fact that a lot of ships were not, they respected the threat, so to speak, of shipping containers being blown up and vessels being blown up in the strait.
00:08:26.000And a deal looked like it was forthcoming on the table.
00:08:34.000It was always just around the corner for about a month and a half after about the 70 day mark in the war.
00:08:42.000And then, basically, since the conflict reignited kinetically, we're now in this situation where ships did attempt to go through and then were getting blown up.
00:08:54.000That caused an escalation in the prices.
00:08:57.000And then with the Houthis now opening up a second front, There's a question about whether any shipping is going to be able to move basically through either front.
00:09:09.000And that is obviously going to have a number of spiral effects.
00:09:15.000Yeah, I mean, we're not able to contain the Houthis.
00:09:18.000We tried to neutralize the Houthi problem last year with limited success.
00:09:24.000Yeah, I mean, when it's an issue of the Strait of Hormuz, you have to worry about stuff that's coming out of any of those particular Gulf states.
00:09:32.000But when it comes to the Red Sea, Then that's something where you're dealing with a lot of global traffic.
00:10:10.000I mean, I guess less so because you could feasibly or you could conceive of them going across the Pacific, but I don't know anything about shipping lanes.
00:10:16.000I don't know what it's like to go across the Pacific or if that even happens very much.
00:10:20.000That's why we need the Sub Saharan Canal.
00:10:23.000Just make a canal straight through Eritrea, Ethiopia, just all of it's a straight line.
00:10:29.000We call it the Donald Trump Sub Saharan Canal.
00:10:31.000There's talk of building, or at least the Saudis were talking about trying to divert around the.
00:10:37.000Trying to do an overland kind of like railway type thing to be able to move, you know, kind of by.
00:10:45.000Now you're creating, you know, bridges and.
00:10:49.000I mean, this is what we were classically doing to destabilize Syria is, you know, if you have oil pipelines or you have logistics over land, you can just bomb the logistics online.
00:10:59.000And the Houthis have no compunction about attacking that stuff.
00:11:28.000Well, the ticking time bomb question is the reserves.
00:11:32.000I mean, one of the things that I think was shocking to a lot of people is various disclosures made around the time the MOU was announced that part of the attempt to strike the deal was based on a perception that.
00:11:52.000We were running low on oil reserves and had to actually strike some sort of detente in order to mitigate reserves from being depleted.
00:12:02.000And that was one of the things that I believe the Iranian foreign minister on X in announcing the MOU said that, you know, the admin was in a position of desperation and that's why they did it.
00:12:14.000And then you had some contemporaneous statements around the depleted reserves, and who knows what's true or not true there.
00:12:23.000There is, if this escalates, it could make an MOU 2.0 a kind of functional necessity to strike ahead of the midterms.
00:12:34.000Yeah, I don't know if I have a strong take on what it means for the midterms.
00:12:41.000I don't know how fast they can get a significant amount of Venezuelan crude actually into the market, you know, as oil that can be refined or whatever.
00:12:55.000I do think that the Republicans are in a great position outside of this conflict.
00:13:02.000But considering, you know, how much damage has already been done to Iran, I don't know that Iran is going to go ahead and be like, okay, if the U.S. were to say pull out and stop, right?
00:13:10.000Like, so there's a lot of people that are anti war that are like, just stop, right?
00:13:26.000Um, You know, the rules have all changed regarding probably the Strait of Hormuz.
00:13:31.000So you're going to likely have to have the military guarding ships that want to go through the Strait of Hormuz, if at all.
00:13:38.000Or Iran's going to say, well, we're just going to, you know, close the Strait when we feel like it or what have you, trying to apply pressure.
00:13:44.000So the idea that just pulling out fixes things, I don't see that as realistic.
00:13:51.000And so I'm not sure that there's any solution that the U.S. has that's good about the midterms.
00:13:57.000I think the The most that the Republicans can rely on now is they can, first of all, like Josie said, Donald Trump can go into the strategic reserves, which I think is a bad idea.
00:14:09.000But at the end of the day, especially for political motivations, that's a terrible idea.
00:14:14.000But that's possibly what they're going to do.
00:14:17.000And then they have to rely on how unpopular the Democrats are now.
00:14:21.000And the Democrats are not looking particularly well.
00:14:24.000We just had something on CNN a couple days ago where the Democrats at this point in 2018 or whatever was up by like 16 points.
00:14:38.000And in 2000, I'm not sure exactly what it was, I'm not sure the dates, but the last two elections, they were up by like 16 and up by 10.
00:14:48.000Which is like within the margin of error.
00:14:50.000So, granted, the Republicans are in a very precarious position right now.
00:14:55.000And I don't think that it's likely that they're going to take the House or that they're going to take back the Senate.
00:15:00.000But they could keep the House even with those kind of numbers because there's redistricting and the bad polling numbers that the Democrats are getting because of all the DSA candidates that are making a lot of noise in the news and stuff.
00:15:16.000And I think the American people, specifically people that are likely to go out and vote.
00:15:21.000In the midterms, I don't think that they like the messages that they're hearing from the DSA.
00:15:25.000And they're underfunded because of the USAID shutdown.
00:15:28.000Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's honestly like, I think Tim was talking about it the other day.
00:15:32.000I think they have like 30 million or something like that.
00:15:34.000I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's, it's a, like the Republicans have like almost a billion dollars through all the PACs and stuff.
00:15:41.000And I think the Democrats have something like 300 million or something like that, but it's a significant deficit.
00:15:46.000And when you have very little money and a bad message, you know, you don't motivate people to go to the polls again.
00:15:54.000Especially when you're dealing with the people that like the DSA, they're young people, they're people that are not high propensity voters, and you're dealing with the people that are the high propensity voters.
00:16:03.000They're people that have some property, they got houses.
00:16:06.000They don't want to hear people saying, Oh, we're going to take your landlords because they're Airbnb's houses, and they don't want to hear that someone wants to be elected that's going to take away their property or something like that.
00:16:20.000And that's what they hear when they hear socialism.
00:16:24.000Young people are favorable to the idea or the term socialism.
00:16:27.000They think of it as just health care and, and, you know, free school.
00:16:31.000Older people, boomers, and, and people in my generation, like they have a different understanding of socialism.
00:16:37.000They understand that there's a lot of expropriation, a lot of things that go along with it.
00:16:41.000So these high propensity voters, the boomers, they know exactly or they have a certain conception of what the DSA is talking about, which likely actually aligns with what the DSA means.
00:16:53.000And they're not going to vote for them.
00:16:55.000Is there a gap in the younger age of voters who show up for midterm elections in the left versus the right?
00:17:02.000Like, do more Democrats or more Republicans show up?
00:17:05.000Because I know that in general, young people don't vote unless it's the national elections and stuff like that or presidential election.
00:17:11.000Is there a gap between the left and the right and who shows up for midterms?
00:17:15.000I don't have numbers, but my gut instinct is yes, because the left are the activists.
00:17:25.000Imagine what you were saying was that you're saying that like Republicans or at least boomers who want to keep their property are more likely to show up for this election because it's a midterm and the rest of the kids are going to stay home.
00:17:36.000But the way I think about it is that the activists are the ones that show up for all the elections.
00:17:39.000That's why they win the school boards, that's why they win the local elections.
00:17:52.000But compared to the number of boomers, because Gen Z is a smaller generation, anyways, there are fewer people in Gen Z.
00:18:00.000And so you're dealing with, even if the numbers were 50 50, Gen Z being right and left, you're dealing with 5 or 10% that are actually the activists.
00:18:10.000And you've got all the boomers that are out there going to say, I don't want to elect someone that's going to take things away from me.
00:18:20.000And I don't know, there are only certain districts where these people are running and they have some kind of.
00:18:29.000You know, grassroots support or what have you.
00:18:32.000But I think to Mike's point, without the USAID money, they just don't have the reserves to be able to get out there and say, hey, you know, we're going to make a serious push.
00:18:43.000And I don't know how useful past precedent and data is on this because, you know, the MAGA revolution really changed a lot of young Republican dynamics.
00:18:54.000You know, it used to be the case that the Republican Party was sort of all older, you know, the classic quote if you're, you know, if you're.
00:19:02.000If you're young and conservative, you don't have a heart.
00:19:06.000If you're old and liberal, you don't have a brain, sort of thing.
00:19:10.000And so you had a natural skewing of the younger demographic, I think, showing up just in the midterms, just by virtue of the young Democrats being the activist class.
00:19:20.000But I think that with the MAGA movement, you had a lot of young people, Charlie and the turning point sort of revolution, with diehards who would show up in, I suspect, in.
00:19:36.000In numbers that Republican movements of the past did not.
00:19:42.000And I think that actually in the 2024 election, didn't Trump win, at least in the white demographic?
00:19:48.000But I believe it was a historical sort of young people demo that was captured in 2024.
00:19:54.000And the key question is going to be, in my view, the mobilization of the new sort of nouveau MAGA hesitant, the kind of MAGA diehards who may or may not be feeling disenchanted because of.
00:20:10.000Uh, you know, certain policy pursuits of the admin, and this gets you know to a number of issues that are kind of playing out contemporaneously, even in the Iran situation.
00:20:23.000You know, the reason the MOU blew apart was because of the Israel Lebanon uh provision in the MOU.
00:20:31.000Uh, and when you know the Israel sort of continued the ingress into Lebanon, that was perceived as a violation of the MOU, then Iran began.
00:20:41.000You know, firing on ships saying, you know, listen, we told you, you can't do this while Israel's in Lebanon.
00:20:47.000And there's sort of a tactical question about whether or not, you know, senior leadership in the admin can sort of get some detente in Lebanon from the Israeli side, whether or not there's a sort of Israeli perception that doing so is the thing to do chronically or the thing to do tactically in order to give support to.
00:21:12.000Basically, you know, Republican chances of keeping that.
00:21:15.000This is one of the things that was talked about was like, is it, do you have a kind of Minsk Accord replay where in 2014, 2015, 2016, the Biden admin was striking these sort of detentes with Russia in the Ukraine Donbass war, but not really striking a peace that was intended to be permanent, but rather to kind of reload because, you know, there was a sort of a need to reload.
00:21:46.000An MOU 2.0 is kind of struck with Israeli cooperation in order to get through the midterm, stabilize prices, and then immediately ratchet back up.
00:21:58.000But the problem is that's now been telegraphed pretty widely.
00:22:01.000And you're basically telling voters, we are sort of doing this as a temporary thing.
00:22:08.000And then as soon as you vote, you know, vote us back in, we're going to relaunch this war you didn't want.
00:22:13.000So, you know, that's like a tough thing to speak to the sort of MAGA hesitance now.
00:22:19.000And since that's the core demographic that, in my view, will determine the midterms, you know, there's a real Rubik's Cube that's difficult to solve here politically.
00:22:30.000I think that it's going to be really hard in the midterms because the coalition that got Trump elected has been shattered.
00:22:39.000So it wasn't just MAGA that got Trump elected.
00:22:41.000It was sort of the America First variation.
00:22:55.000And there's a lot of them that feel betrayed now because a lot of those promises were broken.
00:23:01.000And, you know, as a libertarian, I will say right up, in the first three months of Donald Trump's presidency, he made at the Libertarian Convention 32 promises to the libertarians.
00:23:10.000He made 20 to the world, but he made 32 to the libertarians, implied promises like, I'm the anti war president, and then actual promises.
00:23:19.000And he fulfilled 16 of those promises in the first three months, and then it stopped.
00:23:24.000And when it stopped, so did we, we ended up losing everybody that was in the administration for us, or everybody that was, I mean, we lost Thomas Massey, we lost MTG, we lost Joe Kent.
00:23:51.000I was so optimistic in those first three months, and then it was like a switch flipped.
00:23:57.000Well, I mean, not to sound like I'm just cheerleading the administration, but I think that the things that Trump promised that he hasn't been able to deliver.
00:24:08.000Likely were not within the scope of the presidency, unless you want to list them off.
00:24:17.000The point that I'm making is Trump will run his face.
00:24:20.000And a lot of times he'll say, Yes, I'm going to do this, or I want to do that, or what have you.
00:24:24.000And that doesn't mean that it's actually in the scope of the presidency.
00:24:29.000And I think a lot of people that are critical of Donald Trump, a lot of times they were expecting more than a president could deliver.
00:24:38.000That being said, The whole idea of like the MAGA coalition being shattered and stuff, I don't know, like, I'm not particularly plugged in with like the MAHA stuff.
00:24:47.000That was never my kind of perspective.
00:24:51.000But I understand that there are a lot of people that feel like the president hasn't delivered for them.
00:24:57.000And, you know, as far as because my major concern was deportations and ending the just the caravans of people coming in.
00:25:10.000For me, I'm like, all right, you know, at the very least, we've got that.
00:25:13.000So, I mean, I'm not like, oh, this has been, you know, gangbusters and stuff.
00:25:20.000But it's like you have to have some level of like expectation that's not at the highest level, right?
00:25:25.000Like I said last night on the show, I said, I expected maybe we get some continued tax cuts for the citizens and we get some deportation.
00:25:34.000That was about where I expected it to be.
00:25:36.000But the point was, he advertised himself as somebody who was going to tear down the system and build something new.
00:25:41.000Now, maybe I'm just politically naive, but I just, or Whatever, but I didn't imagine that to be possible.
00:25:46.000And I imagine all presidents as over promising.
00:25:49.000So, if you can get two to three of the things that they're talking about, well, that's, you know, it's, you know, not getting more doesn't mean I'm going to go vote for Ro Khanna or a Democrat.
00:26:01.000But I, to Josie's point, though, like if people don't feel like they've got enough, no matter how much they've got, right?
00:26:08.000Just like a situation when it comes to, like, you know, we talk about kitchen table issues.
00:26:13.000It doesn't matter how much money someone's making, it's do they feel like their dollar is going as far as it should?
00:26:19.000Because people, People vote on feelings.
00:26:21.000So, if there are people out there that were like, Look, I wanted Donald Trump to do this, and they don't feel like he's doing the things that they want, you can't get them up to go to the polls, especially when it's an off year.
00:27:37.000I'm like, look, I get it, because especially if you're branding yourself as Maha, then this is a singular issue that you care about extremely.
00:27:44.000But I don't buy that if the next Democrat comes into office, that they're going to have strong positions on glyphosate either.
00:27:52.000And I guess it's like cutting your nose off to spit your face.
00:28:06.000Like fundraising and Turning Point isn't the same fundamentally that it was a couple of years ago.
00:28:13.000And that's another blow against the administration, they don't have that access to the youth in the same way that they did before, as far as fundraising and getting the kids out and really active in the community.
00:28:23.000Everybody knows that when it comes to door knocking, Democrats do it a thousand times better and they're a thousand times more effective.
00:28:36.000Um, McCarthy and it goes into the Vietnam War.
00:28:40.000They know how to get together, they know how to mobilize, and they know how to get things done.
00:28:44.000And the fact that they vote in midterms means that they get into the school boards and they get into the selectmen, and they get all these small little places where they infiltrate and then they work their way up in the system from there.
00:29:08.000Um, we're gonna jump to this story, and it.
00:29:10.000Ties in with what we were talking about.
00:29:11.000So, from the Washington Post, the Saudi nuclear deal is in doubt as Trump adds a new condition regarding Israel.
00:29:17.000A day after the agreement was signed, the president laid out a new requirement that the Saudis normalize relations with Israel.
00:29:22.000Nothing like signing a deal and changing the rules afterwards.
00:29:26.000Saudi Arabia would need to normalize relations with Israel to receive the U.S. nuclear technology it has long sought, President Donald Trump said Thursday, adding a new and potentially deal ending stipulation to an agreement signed just a day earlier.
00:29:38.000The nuclear deal, which was fiercely opposed by Israel and others concerned about nuclear proliferation, I'm not sure if it's really nuclear proliferation when it comes to Israel being concerned about the Saudis, but either way, is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, Trump said in a social media post, referring to the effort from his first term to normalize relations between Israel and the Muslim majority countries from which it had long been estranged.
00:29:58.000The Saudis have thus far refused to join the accord.
00:30:02.000It was the latest whiplash inducing policy shift from the White House, which had faced down considerable political opposition to push forward with the Saudi deal.
00:30:11.000The Biden administration also discussed a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, but tied any agreement to opening diplomatic relations with Israel, a move that has the potential to reshape dynamics in the Middle East, but which remains distant.
00:30:24.000If the Saudis don't join the Abraham Accords, the deal is off, White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levett said a few hours after Trump's post, responding to questions from reporters.
00:30:33.000I know that obviously one of the big problems that the administration and other previous administrations have noted about Iran getting a nuclear weapon is it will be.
00:30:45.000It would force Saudi Arabia to get it.
00:31:19.000By putting more supply on the market, it helps bring down the price of it.
00:31:25.000In a time like this, when there could be permanent perturbations in the global supply because of this, this would actually help a lot in a lot of ways.
00:31:35.000And this is part of the broader Saudi strategy of diversifying into non oil fields.
00:31:43.000And they're doing this in all sorts of areas.
00:31:45.000You were just talking, Brett and I were just talking about that this morning on PCC.
00:31:48.0002030, or whatever they call their operation.
00:31:51.000That's why WWE is so heavily featured over there now.
00:31:55.000They have the comedians out there to do the shows.
00:31:57.000They want to become not just a destination for American entertainment or American citizens, but a net exporter for a lot of the stuff.
00:32:06.000The idea is it's almost like being a cocaine dealer.
00:32:09.000If you wean yourself off the coke habit, you have more to ship.
00:32:13.000This is the 10 crack commandments, the biggie never get high on your own supply.
00:32:17.000They can just use all that supply as revenue rather than having to.
00:32:21.000You know, use it domestically to power everything.
00:32:23.000To be fair, I'm of the opinion that burning oil is probably not the best use for it, considering it's basically like the wonder.
00:32:34.000Like, it's basically like modern society fuel.
00:32:37.000Like, everything we use is made of oil petrochemicals, fertilizer, all the plastics, every, you know, all the tires, like all of this stuff that pharmaceuticals, yeah, that makes modern life possible.
00:32:52.000And so just burning it in, in, In cars, does honestly seem when you have other alternatives, uh, it does seem kind of like a waste.
00:33:00.000I mean, I know I'm a little bit biased because I've got an electric car, but like, you know, there are far better uses for oil, and it so it makes sense to not need to burn as much as we do.
00:33:11.000And if Saudi Arabia wants to get on nuclear power, I mean, I do feel like the Saudi government is fairly responsible as an international kind of organization.
00:33:24.000But I think that there are a lot of elements in the, in the, uh, like in Saudi Arabia that are very, very, uh, hostile to the U.S. still.
00:33:33.000I mean, you look at the, you look at the, the, um, the 9 11, how many people from, for 9 11 were, were Saudis and stuff.
00:33:48.000It's not like they were from, you know, it's not like they were Russians from, you know, they were from Moscow or whatever, no matter who funded them or whatever.
00:33:58.000But so I do think that there are a lot of elements.
00:34:00.000Was it CIA chief in Riyadh at the time?
00:34:11.000Have you ever read Michael Springman, the visa chief?
00:34:15.000In the State Department consulate at the time, who was surrounded 75% of the staff with CIA, wrote this book called Visas for Terrorists about that whole affair.
00:34:27.000You know, the thing that sucks is he's still walking around free.
00:34:30.000Well, yeah, but the pressure's on him.
00:34:33.000But, anyways, more to the point, I don't think that the Saudis having nuclear power is such a big threat to the US.
00:34:43.000But I do think that, you know, Putting making a deal and then saying, Oh, you have to change the deal after it's been agreed to that's a massive problem.
00:34:53.000Like, you can't sit there and be like, Oh, now you have to go ahead and hang out with our friend, too.
00:34:57.000It's like, Ah, you know, like you've already set the conditions for the deal, you know.
00:35:02.000So, yeah, I mean, so what you have is kind of a left hand, right hand relationship with the Saudis and the Israelis in the Middle East, which, you know, in each case goes back 80 years.
00:35:14.000And in particular, the Republican Party.
00:35:19.000And within that, especially the MAGA movement, the Saudis have been early and often supporters.
00:35:27.000Both the Israelis and Saudis came together in support of Trump, really, ahead of the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, in large part because both the Saudis and Israelis hated the Iran deal that Obama struck.
00:35:44.000And this caused MBS and Saudi and the Netanyahu government in Israel to really clamor behind Trump.
00:35:55.000And it really brought the Saudis and Israelis together in an alignment against Iran from the Saudi perspective because Iran competes commercially and from the Israeli perspective because of the security and other sort of regional dominance concerns.
00:36:13.000But what's, yeah, I think that this is basically a way of tanking it.
00:36:17.000This condition, Saudi is not going to agree to.
00:36:20.000And it looks like the administration just.
00:36:24.000Purely speculative, just how it reads on its face is that they wanted to do this, and then the Israeli delegation put a lot of pressure on and said, You have to add this.
00:36:35.000And our delegation, knowing it would kill the deal, but wanting to respect the Israelis, laid it on the table and it basically kills it.
00:36:43.000So I think this is basically late stage pressure from the Israeli side.
00:36:50.000And this is because of the local rivalry.
00:36:53.000The Israelis don't want the Saudis to be able to have this capacity.
00:36:58.000MBS and Saudi have said that they would only develop nuclear weapons if Iran did.
00:37:05.000But obviously, the Saudis being a nuclear power sort of changes the security balance in case there's ever a conflict between the Israelis and the Saudis, which is without the U.S. sort of peacemaking that is not off the table, you know, sometime in the decades ahead.
00:37:23.000But once you have nukes, you have nukes forever.
00:37:26.000And You know, this could also cause a domino.
00:37:29.000You know, what other Gulf states, you say, hey, the Saudis have it, you know, us as well.
00:37:36.000Do you think it'd be likely that if the Saudis were to get, you know, like some kind of nuclear weapon, do you think that they would be like, oh, you know, UAE will go ahead and we'll give you this technology or, you know, something along those lines?
00:37:59.000You know, this also is something that I think, you know, the Democrats have a.
00:38:05.000are currently in a bind in terms of Middle East relations because of the legacy Iran deal and some of the just stakeholder relationships with donors and whatnot with the DNC, where the Democrats are in large part significantly opposed to both MBS and Saudi and the Netanyahu government.
00:38:27.000And I don't think that, for example, A Democrat administration would want to strike this sort of deal with the Saudis and give them this dual use capacity.
00:38:41.000So I think there's sort of a time sensitivity to try to do this right now from the administration side.
00:38:49.000But, like I said, I think this is a way of basically calling the deal off.
00:38:53.000All right, we're going to jump to another story that actually involves Israel.
00:39:01.000From Fox News, chaos erupts as the House passes $1.15 trillion defense bill with Israel provision.
00:39:08.000And I don't know why this is part of the headline, but it says, Stop stoking Jew hatred.
00:39:18.000From Fox News, the House passed its $1.5 trillion annual defense policy bill Wednesday after a bipartisan revolt over a provision expanding U.S. Israel defense technology cooperation.
00:39:29.000The fiscal year 2027 NDAA passed 216 to 212.
00:39:34.000With Republicans largely supporting and Democrats mostly opposing the measure.
00:39:38.000The annual bill, which sets Pentagon policy and typically draws broad bipartisan support, received only six Democrat votes, as much of the caucus objected to Section 219 and the Republican backed amendment restricting transgender care and easing access to personal guns on military bases.
00:39:57.000That's something they're going to talk about?
00:39:58.000Anyways, opposition came from a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republican skeptics of U.S. support for Israel.
00:40:06.000Who accused congressional leaders of shielding the provision from scrutiny after lawmakers were denied a separate vote to remove it?
00:40:12.000A fight erupted as support for Israel has weakened among House Democrats and some America First Republicans during the war in Gaza and the widening conflict with Iran.
00:40:20.000Just one week earlier, 103 Democrats joined Rep. Thomas Massey from Kentucky in voting to block $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel.
00:40:28.000For opponents, Section 219 would move the relationship in the opposite direction by embedding U.S. Israel cooperation more deeply inside the Pentagon's weapons development and.
00:40:38.000The provision would direct the War Secretary to designate a Pentagon executive agent to coordinate and accelerate bilateral defense research, testing, and industrial cooperation.
00:40:48.000Critics argue that the structure would make the relationship harder for future administrations or Congress to unwind and could shift parts of the partnership away from highly visible aid votes into less visible technology, procurement, and production arrangements.
00:41:00.000Supporters said it would coordinate longstanding programs and give the United States faster access to Israeli defense technology.
00:41:07.000Josie, you were saying that this is, and I've heard a lot of libertarians saying that this is merging the U.S. military with Iran.
00:41:46.000And when they say that, then, It's trivialized, and people who are in support of this are able to trivialize it.
00:41:53.000So, it's merging their military industrial complexes, essentially, is what that is.
00:42:00.000So, it significantly undermines American sovereignty.
00:42:03.000Okay, it embeds Israeli tech into our weapons programs and our supply chains.
00:42:09.000And as the article said, it makes it so that Congress, who would normally vote on this every year with appropriations, can't do that anymore.
00:42:42.000So as soon as it goes into that, it's a really bad thing.
00:42:45.000And what's big about this is that, yes, we do have these past agreements, but what it's doing is it's making our military depend indefinitely.
00:42:55.000On the industry success and the policy success of a foreign nation.
00:43:00.000And once we're in that position, we have stared far too long into the abyss and we are becoming the foreign entanglement in the permanent alliance that George Washington warned us about.
00:43:13.000And there's a slew of other issues that come with this too.
00:43:16.000Like we talked about an agent that's going to oversee all of this.
00:45:58.000They were also talking about Democrats were not backing it because of amendments restricting transgender care and easing cases and easing access to personal guns on military bases.
00:46:10.000Is that just like misdirection or is that something that.
00:46:15.000Well, I think what they're getting at is there may have been some pro Israel Democrats who.
00:46:21.000were torn with their own between their own coalition because it's a package deal.
00:46:25.000You know, if you vote for this, then you are also voting for restricting the transgender care sort of thing.
00:46:32.000So there may have been some, you know, the vote tally may have been slightly different.
00:46:38.000I think it's just all they're trying to get at there.
00:46:42.000The NDA usually passes very easily, right?
00:46:45.000I mean, even when there was the, I forget what it was, but there's been a couple times where, you know, libertarians were, Pretty concerned about NDAs.
00:46:57.000I think generally they are, but there have been a few issues about monitoring of.
00:47:30.000You know, there are a couple of things about it that are, you know, a little bit eye popping in light of everything else playing out around the MAGA coalition dynamics.
00:47:41.000And, you know, as we talked about, Republican, you know, sort of MAGA hesitant voter mobilization, you know, that this has been a wedge issue, I would say, since the 12 day war last year.
00:47:54.000You know, for this to be happening just a couple months ahead of the midterms, when sort of the key coalition base that you're trying to mobilize are those.
00:48:05.000You know, that you may have lost because of prior endeavors around this issue.
00:48:11.000You know, there is a very real path dependency problem with this.
00:48:18.000So, you know, when we sell F 35s to foreign countries, you know, they want the latest and greatest jets and we sell them for a huge markup.
00:48:29.000But at the end of the day, we kind of have a kill switch on the tech.
00:48:33.000If they don't get in a conflict with them or if they're ever being intransigent in negotiations on trade or any oil or anything else, we can always threaten to, hey, you're going to turn the keys off on the fighter jets and you're going to be left with nothing.
00:48:51.000And so there is a dependence on the underlying tech to say nothing of the issues around the fact that.
00:49:32.000But they do, Claude really is the best in class right now in AI as it currently stands.
00:49:39.000But there were problems between Anthropic and the Pentagon and all this kind of political stuff.
00:49:45.000But the Pentagon was having a real hard time getting Anthropic out of their systems because the interoperability problem is vast.
00:49:53.000You have so many systems that run on it and you can't just piecemeal change one thing without another thing getting affected.
00:50:01.000And you form a sort of Structural dependency at the base layer that would be prohibitively expensive or time consuming with sensitive in process things happening that you just can't branch off of it in the way that you might desire because you have this sort of core dependency.
00:50:25.000And you could see something similar happening with respect to this 219, where if, for example, one of the questions when you think about this Saudi deal, And as I mentioned, this looks like this was some kind of late stage intervention by the Israeli delegation.
00:50:44.000And the White House sort of sided with the Israeli delegation on it and inserted this provision, knowing it would kill the US Saudi deal.
00:50:52.000And the question is well, what kind of leverage can a foreign country deploy, for example, when the delegation makes that ask?
00:51:01.000And sometimes it's over trade, sometimes it's over industrial concerns, sometimes it's over security ones.
00:51:08.000You know, if you don't do this, then we will cut off your access to this.
00:51:13.000We will limit our, you know, security, our technology.
00:51:18.000And once you have Pentagon systems that are dependent on that base route, that becomes another point of leverage in any negotiation, whether it's security related or not.
00:51:31.000And, you know, now there already are significant Pentagon dependencies on this.
00:51:35.000I mean, the sort of Unit 8200 and Amman, you know, type Israeli tech.
00:51:42.000Is already in significant use at the Pentagon level.
00:51:46.000So it's not like this is something from nothing, but the legal requirement to do it and the fact that it is Pentagon wide, the executive agent has a Pentagon wide, this is not like one, you know, just one thing.
00:52:02.000This is all Pentagon systems, effectively, that will have this sort of mandatory Israeli military industrial complex integration.
00:52:12.000And there's really no precedent for this.
00:52:15.000And it's happening concomitantly with the push, I believe, by Tom Cotton for mandatory intelligence sharing, making it illegal to not share certain classified information with Israeli counterparts.
00:52:35.000I would presume that doesn't mean every bit of intelligence that the U.S. comes up with or produces.
00:52:42.000Is it only stuff that's pertinent to Israel or is it anything that Israel comes and says they want?
00:52:48.000And how would the Department of War say, well, this stuff you can have or this stuff you can't have if there's some kind of legal framework that says you have to give it to them?
00:52:58.000Well, this is 622 from Tom Cotton, who is the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.
00:53:19.000It includes plans and intentions of both state and non state actors.
00:53:24.000So, for example, if the CIA were to learn about plans or intentions of Hezbollah, or something, or the Houthis, or the Iranians, or the Qataris, and it would have an impact materially, potentially, on Israeli foreign policy or national security.
00:53:43.000That effectively, the intelligence community would be required by law, it would be illegal not to share that with the Israelis unless the president himself intervenes and puts forward a justifiable legal reason under U.S. national security not to.
00:54:36.000Creates a signaling to even try to undo it.
00:54:41.000It's almost like to undo it in the future is to sort of attack the alliance itself and has its own political baggage.
00:54:50.000But it, you know, the fact that it's coming from the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the most, you know, powerful person in the Senate overseeing the CIA, shows you the kind of institutional support there is for that.
00:55:28.000I think we're going to jump to another story that Mike has some info on.
00:55:34.000From Fox News Rand Paul releases docs that reveal FBI halted border inspection of virus research over Wuhan lab links.
00:55:42.000Mike sent me a boatload of links, but we're going to read the story here first.
00:55:46.000Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection were preparing to question a British zoologist and disease ecology expert upon his return to the United States from the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of COVID 19 before the FBI intervened and asked agents to stand down, according to files released Monday by Senator Rand Paul.
00:56:05.000They told the public a COVID lab leak wasn't possible, wasn't plausible, Rand wrote on X. Their own private messages say otherwise.
00:56:12.000Today, I'm launching the reading room where the public can view records related to my ongoing investigation, not just conclusions, but the actual documents.
00:56:19.000It's funny that they called him by his first name there, huh?
00:56:22.000The documents show CBP's National Targeting Center flagged Peter Dazzek as a high person of interest ahead of his February 5th, 2021 arrival at JFK International Airport.
00:56:33.000Dazzek, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, was flagged because of more than 15 years of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his longstanding relationship with its lead researcher, Zheng Li Shi, as well as his role as principal investigator on National Institutes of Health grants and funding bat coronavirus research in China.
00:56:54.000Much of the funding Dazic received was put forward towards gain of function research, the documents state.
00:56:58.000Now, the gain of function research stuff, Fauci swore up and down that that didn't happen, right?
00:57:14.000So, why don't you go ahead and unpack a little bit of this for the viewers so they understand exactly what the reading room means and what kind of information Rand Paul has kind of made available?
00:57:26.000So, this is coming from Senator Rand Paul, who has been an absolute pitbull on this issue since the pandemic itself.
00:57:34.000But this is sort of a continuation in a long line of disclosures that he's obtained around the intelligence community relationship with COVID, around the researchers, around the sort of cover up in media institutions.
00:57:50.000What was just made public by Senator Paul were.
00:57:57.000The Slack messages between the authors of the proximal origin paper in March 2020, which was the sort of official explanation at the early stages of the outbreak about how this could not possibly humanly, scientifically, theoretically, hypothetically, at all have come from a lab, namely the Wuhan lab, that this was zoonotic in origin.
00:58:23.000This came from probably a pangolin, you know, sort of thing.
00:58:31.000Well, this was this paper was highly influential in quelling the early questions about the Wuhan lab.
00:58:41.000And what Senator Paul just published were the internal communications between the authors of this paper, showing that they didn't believe anything that they were saying and that they were lying, they knew they were lying, and then they themselves.
00:58:59.000Subsequently, got more and more shocked about the disclosures around the Wuhan lab.
00:59:04.000So, to name a few highlights that stand out about this, they were frequently referring to, they said that the majority of the researchers that they spoke to thought it leaked from a lab.
00:59:18.000They admitted in their own Slack chats that they lied about, there's a line in the Proximal Origins report where it tries to downplay the.
00:59:30.000The gain of function bat born coronavirus research being done at the Wuhan lab saying that this is done all over the world in BSL2 labs, like lower security.
00:59:41.000You know, this research is done all over the world.
00:59:43.000The fact that it's done in the Wuhan lab doesn't say much because it's done everywhere.
00:59:49.000So if they were, you know, this, so it's really not that significant that this was also done in Wuhan.
00:59:56.000And that was the Bryce Nichols tweet that you sent, right?
01:00:00.000And what they say is, but that isn't, if you see, it says, We describe in the paper and say that this work is performed all over the world, but that isn't true.
01:00:09.000It's exclusively been going on at the Wuhan lab.
01:00:12.000And so, you know, for six years, you know, the official explanation is oh, this is an ordinary course, it happens all over the world, but turns out it was only happening at the very lab where the intelligence community assessment is that it leaked from and where the outbreak, I mean, it broke out in Wuhan, China, and at the BSL 4 lab, which is the highest security lab.
01:00:35.000You know, the BSL 4 lab is the star of Outbreak, the 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie.
01:00:43.000But what I'm getting at here is this was a lie that they told knowingly in order to quell this.
01:00:51.000And then they seem to get so convinced in these messages that they're frequently referring, joking, that they're surprised that it leaked in Wuhan and that it didn't leak in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the UNC Chapel Hill lab is.
01:01:08.000And that was, of course, run by Ralph Barrick and the EcoHealth and Peter Daschick boys.
01:01:15.000Daschick and Barrick are kind of the two.
01:01:17.000Domestic stars of this, Ralph Barrick, Rand Paul showed, had been working with the CIA and ODI on bat borne coronavirus research.
01:01:28.000He published their redacted comms in 2015 and the like.
01:01:36.000One of the most significant parts of these revelations, in my view, is the DARPA diffuse and preempt programs.
01:01:44.000The DARPA, so effectively, and I sent you one of the.
01:01:48.000The comms on this, if you can put it up on the screen at some point.
01:01:52.000This is the DARPA diffuse and DARPA preempt comms on this.
01:01:58.000So here's what shocked even the authors of the March 2020 Proximal Origins paper, the cover up paper.
01:02:07.000They did not know until 2021, a year after they published this paper, that Peter Daschick had proposed, together with Ralph Barrick, a gain of function.
01:02:20.000Program to do bat borne coronavirus, super juicing bat borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab to DARPA in 2018, just one year before the outbreak.
01:02:32.000And this is something, so basically, the unique feature of SARS CoV 2 was this insertion of a fern cleavage site that is evidently never been seen in a beta coronavirus before.
01:02:54.000That sort of distinguishes what COVID is.
01:02:58.000And as it turns out, Peter Daschik himself, together with his USAID funded team, proposed to DARPA to create the very thing that COVID turned out to be the year before COVID happened at the very lab in the very town it broke out in.
01:03:21.000And so, when you, because these Slack messages go into that later time period, They describe what was an effective betrayal in their view that they came out and published this paper,
01:03:36.000not knowing, you know, they were covering up for Dashik and Barak, not knowing that they had proposed to DARPA to actually create the biological identical equivalent of what COVID is in that very lab.
01:03:55.000And now, this is the part, this is the piece that you're talking about from DARPA, right?
01:03:58.000Dr. Ralph Barrick testified to Rand Paul's committee in April that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency preempt program solicited proposals for gain of function experiments almost two years before the COVID 19 pandemic, right?
01:04:10.000Well, that's Barrick's testimony about it.
01:04:12.000But if you look for the comms between, I believe, Christian Anderson and on it, you can see how they reacted to the news that I believe the group Drastic published.
01:04:25.000They learned what's so funny is these insiders.
01:04:28.000In the virology, epidemiology profession, these esteemed researchers and scientifically acclaimed high profile figures learned about the DARPA proposal the same time as the internet did and were themselves gobsmacked that they went out on the line to defend Dashik and Barak, not saying it couldn't have been a lab leak.
01:04:55.000And then they learned, oh my God, they were actually creating.
01:04:59.000COVID in the lab, in that very lab where it leaked from.
01:05:04.000Now, the defense on this is that, so basically you had two programs happening simultaneously.
01:05:14.000You had a USAID program and a DARPA program.
01:05:18.000USAID in 2009 created something called PREDICT.
01:05:22.000And this was basically a global program to collect hundreds of thousands of virus samples.
01:05:31.000And then run various experiments on them in order to sort of chronicle potential outbreaks and develop vaccines, you know, to defend against them.
01:05:42.000That's where the gain of function comes in.
01:05:43.000You superjuice a virus in order to create a vaccine to defend against in case that virus makes the jump, that variant of it.
01:05:54.000And so USAID had been funding Dashik, Barak, that whole team for basically 15 years, from 2009.
01:06:04.000Up until 2024, USAID had been running this program.
01:06:09.000And in particular, what USAID did, it funded Peter Daschik to go into the Yunnan bat caves in southern China and collect tens of thousands of bat samples to bring to the lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
01:06:26.000And so Daschik had this very deep relationship with the Wuhan lab on USAID payroll to bring all of these bat samples to be tested on in Wuhan.
01:06:38.000For basically a decade before the outbreak in 2019.
01:06:44.000Then in 2018, Dashik applies for this DARPA grant to say, listen, we have all these USAID funded bat samples in the lab.
01:06:54.000We want to superjuice them with gain of function and we want to insert a fern cleavage site into this to make it more easy to modify.
01:07:10.000So you had these two, you had The USAID Predict program and the DARPA Preempt program.
01:07:14.000And this was sort of the USAID was funding, you know, collecting the bat samples, and DARPA was sort of, you know, developing vaccines on the basis of all the samples that USAID and the maintenance of the, you know, research community and everything that USAID was funding.
01:07:30.000So while Dashik and Barak are working basically with both of these, USAID and DARPA, they go to the DARPA side of this, knowing that the USAID program money was about to run out.
01:07:44.000I believe in 2020 or something like that.
01:07:47.000Dashik pitches in 2018 this diffuse proposal under the preempt program to do this.
01:07:56.000And the official story is that DARPA declined this grant, this proposal.
01:08:03.000And so the idea was even though it looks shady as hell that the EcoHealth Alliance network, working directly with the Wuhan lab, was proposing to create COVID under the diffuse proposal, at the end of the day, DARPA said no, right?
01:08:22.000So they didn't get the DARPA money, is the official story on this, to do this.
01:08:27.000But the question is, could they have taken that USAID money or the NIH grants that they had and done it anyway for a number of reasons?
01:08:36.000They could claim scientific breakthroughs, they could show some success, they could simply, they're already in the lab experimenting on these just because DARPA didn't go through with it, or maybe was there, were there comms?
01:08:50.000Like we still don't have the DARPA side of this.
01:08:52.000This is one of these things where getting the internal DARPA comms would be huge on this.
01:08:59.000There's going to be a contracting officer.
01:09:01.000There's going to be all levels up and down the chain reviewing this.
01:09:06.000Congress doesn't have the ability to pull people from DARPA in and have them testify, or is it classified stuff?
01:09:14.000I mean, ostensibly, they would be able to do it behind closed doors.
01:09:17.000Well, this is my ask since Dr. Paul, if you're listening, get the DARPA internal comms.
01:09:26.000I know that you're deposing Fauci or something next week.
01:09:31.000Done excellent diligence on the CIA and ODNI and NIH and now the Proximal Origins front.
01:09:38.000But the DARPA internal comms will be very revealing in terms of the continuing relationship.
01:09:45.000For example, we don't know the reason that the diffuse proposal was turned down.
01:09:50.000It could be that they may not have thought it was viable, maybe come back after you've shown signs of success.
01:09:56.000There could have been comms that said, listen, we're not going to give you the money at this point.
01:10:01.000You know, if you have a more promising blueprint for the amount of money that you're asking for, come back and show.
01:10:08.000This is a common thing that happens with these grant and contract negotiations listen, it sounds good in concept, but we don't want to bet on this startup proposal unless you have already shown it's got a high likelihood of success.
01:10:20.000So it's very possible that even if he didn't get authorized by DARPA to do it, that he did it in order to qualify for a renewed proposal.
01:10:29.000But then the outbreak happened the very next year, potentially with the very samples that he.
01:10:35.000Could have been running those experiments on.
01:10:37.000The question was, is he doing it anyway?
01:10:43.000And there's a number of ways to get at that.
01:10:45.000One is the DARPA communications, another is the USAID communications, another are the Columbia and the UC Davis communications, because the USAID program was administered by UC Davis and Columbia and Stephen Morrison, that network.
01:11:01.000And to date, we don't have any of those comms, files, records, emails, chat logs, any of that.
01:11:08.000It goes dark at the Dashik level, but Dashik was reporting up to his grant officers at NIH, at USAID, at DARPA under the preempt.
01:11:41.000JFK files level, you know, 100,000 documents over the course of all these years between Dashik, Barak, and the various grant officers.
01:11:52.000Okay, so what kind of, I mean, what's the likelihood that any of these communications would be able to be brought to, like, the public?
01:12:06.000Is this stuff that's, like I said, classified or is it something that you could actually show the American people?
01:12:11.000Well, this comes down to a threshold decision that the administration will be forced to make if this is how much transparency to give on this.
01:12:21.000I texted you a very revealing, comedic moment in this Slack chat between the cover up artists there.
01:12:30.000If you can pull up the quote around the Chinese conference, it says $15,000 and $15 million.
01:12:39.000And if you look for the one where he says, I'm about to give this talk.
01:12:46.000From KGA to KGA to Bob on Chinese speaking fee.
01:13:13.000For just like a conference or something?
01:13:15.000I almost don't want to reveal the punchline because it's so funny.
01:13:19.000And you have to remember the context that this is playing out in the middle of the first Trump administration blaming China.
01:13:27.000And you have these sort of Chinese affiliated researchers who are, okay, so on Chinese speaking, so these are, again, authors of this cover up report.
01:13:37.000Chinese speaking fee reply back and ask for $15,000, and you'll say the virus is all natural, $150,000, and you'll say it's from America.
01:13:46.000Or 15 million, and you'll say Donald Trump made it.
01:13:52.000Yeah, well, it's a joke, but it gets to the heart of the diplomatic sensitivities around disclosure, around the USAID DARPA side of all this.
01:14:03.000Which is that, you know, the official story is, I mean, there's, I guess, several competing official stories at this point, but nominally leaked from a lab in China, but it was done in collaboration with US researchers.
01:14:23.000And so there is, if you remember at the time, the first Trump administration was almost campaigning on a global Chinese funded global compensation fund for creating COVID.
01:14:42.000And then you had the sort of Democrat apparatus saying that's xenophobic and, you know, there's a knockout game being played in New York City because of people attacking Chinese people over this and what.
01:14:54.000This became this question about the role of Chinese complicity in this.
01:14:59.000Now, the problem, and in my view, one of the significant blockages in getting disclosure to this point, and one of the reasons, in my view, the CIA and ODNI documents have to be so deeply redacted, and there's been so much national security interference in this issue, is because of the fact that, you know, if you're going to blame it on Zhang Li Xi in China, who was her collaborator?
01:15:21.000It was Ralph Barrett, it was Peter Daschik, it was the whole.
01:15:26.000They were all on US government payroll, military payroll, NIH payroll, USAID payroll.
01:15:31.000And we'd been working with that lab for 15 years doing it there.
01:15:34.000But the question is, if it turns out that Dashik and Barak were basically the progenitors of this, could that cause a diplomatic kerfuffle saying that it was an American program that created COVID?
01:15:50.000It's literally a Scooby Doo situation where you pull the mask off and it's just America underneath the mask.
01:15:56.000Well, that, I think, is the tail risk of solving the mystery.
01:16:02.000So, what do you think the general public even sees this now?
01:16:07.000Like one of the things about COVID, and I guess the great thing about following up on this is that the public sentiment isn't there to continue to follow up on this like the way people would like, right?
01:16:16.000Like somebody who's following it closely understands what happened was an unbelievable betrayal of the world in a sense.
01:16:23.000And for America to be at the heart of this, that's a huge problem.
01:16:26.000But a lot of the general public has moved on and want to either pretend it didn't happen or they're not curious enough to ask, you know, was this something that came from a lab?
01:16:38.000Outside of working directly in the political sphere, I don't see a lot of curiosity around it.
01:16:45.000So I don't even know what the average person thinks about what happened.
01:16:48.000Well, I think that because there are so many technical layers and such a large cast of characters in fields that very few people work in, I mean, you're talking about like virology and veterinary medicine, too hard for the average person to digest.
01:17:03.000And you're talking about a million of government agencies and this all.
01:17:08.000I think that the public's interest would be reignited were you to find a smoking gun that easily answers the story and goes, oh, that's why I had to, you know, lock down my kid.
01:17:22.000But the problem is, is, you know, this is a long term mystery to solve, and there's episodic updates.
01:17:29.000And, you know, there's, I think it's going to take that level of effort over, you know, the months and years ahead to sort of get deeper and deeper.
01:18:04.000But I do think it's a living issue because one of the things, like Elon Musk was just interviewed, I think earlier today or yesterday, you know, about.
01:18:12.000How shutting down USAID makes us more at risk about breakout pandemics.
01:18:18.000And right now, Ebola is circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it's because we shut down USAID.
01:18:23.000I had no idea that USAID had anything to do with funding the pandemic.
01:18:27.000The fact that USAID may have actually created COVID is not a good look for arguing that we should fund, you know, that USAID was doing any good with respect to Ebola response or SARS or MERS.
01:18:42.000How many other outbreaks did USAID actually cause rather than?
01:18:46.000Prevent when we set up these programs in the very countries where the outbreak occurred.
01:18:51.000Is this the first time that, like, so this is the first time that I've heard that USAID was involved with COVID?
01:18:57.000Is that something that generally the public is aware of, or is this new information, or?
01:19:02.000It has received less attention, I think, just because people hear DARPA and they go, Ooh, DARPA.
01:19:09.000People hear the CIA, oh, Ralph Barrack was working with the CIA, you know, and Fauci was such a big presence.
01:19:15.000And anyone that knows you knows that USAID and CIA are basically the same thing.
01:19:20.000And most extensive relationship with it.
01:19:23.000It was in that article that you pulled up when it said that Peter Dasch had a 15 year relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
01:19:35.000That was when USAID Predict was stood up.
01:19:38.000And in fact, when the outbreak first happened, Dashik and Klan gave a quote to the press about wow, it's incredible that SARS CoV 2 has a 99.6% biographic or basically biological match to the bats that we found in the Horseshoe Caves in Yunnan that we brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a USAID grant.
01:20:07.000And that was seen as like USAID was bragging about that in the early parts of the pandemic to say, oh, this puts us in ready position to try to find a vaccine because serendipitously we happen to have the exact bat samples that match, you know, this SARS CoV 2.
01:20:28.000How connected were they to the American medical companies that were trying to find a vaccine for this when we should have had a head start from the beginning?
01:20:53.000He was on, he was, he was the head of Gilead before he was made the, you know, Gilead, which made Remdesivir during COVID.
01:21:01.000You know, he was the, what, chairman of the board of Gilead right before he was plucked to be the secretary of, Or the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, and then off to the races with anthrax and all this stuff, getting all the biodefense stuff set up by that very Pentagon.
01:21:21.000And what happens is these US government agencies make the markets for Pfizer and JJ and Merck and all these companies overseas.
01:21:31.000The State Department, USAID, and military programs create basically the markets for sale, distribution, Ability to offload backlogged products.
01:21:45.000And just even if a country doesn't want it, we basically use our diplomatic leverage.
01:21:50.000We use the humanitarian assistance to help them pay for Pfizer products.
01:21:56.000And we do this everywhere Africa, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia.
01:22:04.000And so there's this very deep relationship between the pharmaceutical companies and the national security complex, in part because the national security complex.
01:22:12.000When they declare a pandemic or when they declare a public health initiative, they're selling the products and forcing the sale in many respects.
01:22:20.000In order to be, if you want to get your IMF loan distribution so that your friggin' Zambian economy doesn't go insolvent, you have to respond to this public health thing by buying Pfizer products.
01:22:31.000Nothing says cronyism quite like creating the problem so that you can sell them the solution.
01:22:37.000I don't even know how much I buy that.
01:22:38.000Like you mentioned the idea of the smoking gun, but like you said earlier, Fauci lied under oath about gain of function research.
01:22:45.000And if the average person doesn't comprehend how serious that is, I just think there's a whole lot of apathy from the general public.
01:22:52.000It's very acute when it's going on, but as soon as they're out again, they're not being surrounded by people with masks that remind them of what's going on, and they're back living in the world again, that desire for change kind of goes away.
01:23:05.000The pardon that he got is a big part of why people have this kind of, it was a big contributor to the cynicism that people feel.
01:23:15.000They're just like, look, man, It's rigged, right?
01:23:18.000Like, he clearly lied under oath about something that killed a boatload of people around the world and basically shredded our civil liberties for a year and a half.
01:23:30.000And the Biden administration just said, Yeah, you're fine.
01:23:34.000You know, like, and he had an instrumental role in the production of it.
01:23:41.000But to the admin's credit, they just arrested a couple months ago his right-hand man, David Morans, who was the guy who was deleting, you know, uh, Tricks we learned from the FOIA lady to make documents disappear after they've already been legally requested under subpoena or Freedom of Information Act.
01:23:57.000And so, you know, there has been, I think, an earnest attempt by the Justice Department to go back.
01:24:04.000I mean, the David Moran's one is a big one.
01:24:07.000And, you know, they hit him with, you know, basically obstruction, concealment, destruction of federal records, violations of the Records Act, which is something that he was bragging about.
01:24:20.000We knew about that under the Biden administration, the David Moran's emails and.
01:24:25.000You know, the destruction of evidence about the cover up.
01:24:28.000And they did go, the Justice Department did hit him with, I think, like 15 years worth of charges.
01:24:34.000And, but, you know, Fauci is protected.
01:24:37.000There is one way that Fauci can go to prison.
01:24:39.000It's not going to be for a long time and it's not going to be for what he should go to prison for forever.
01:24:52.000I mean, I mean, yeah, it'd be nice if he, you know, If he's like, no, I'm not going to go, and they just say, okay, we're going to get you for your contempt of Congress, I mean, he's deep, deep, deep swamp.
01:25:09.000So they have sets of rules that they would use on Steve Bannon that they're not going to use on Fauci, but that is a way.
01:25:15.000But the point that I'm making is like, that's not going to be satisfactory because the point is the reason people are so cynical nowadays is because.
01:25:29.000You know, they always get away with it, right?
01:25:31.000That's essentially how everyone feels.
01:25:33.000And even if he goes to jail for a year, people are going to be like, that's not enough.
01:25:37.000Because, again, consider the magnitude of what happened, right?
01:26:02.000The point that I'm making is like he did something like the reason that everybody is feel has felt like they don't, you know, they can't make ends meet is largely because COVID shut the global economy down basically for a year and change.
01:26:18.000And we printed all this money because of COVID.
01:26:20.000Like he's he was instrumental in ruining a lot of people's lives.
01:26:27.000And by a lot of people, I mean a lot of people, not just in the US, but around the world.
01:26:42.000But you're not going to satisfy people that had to watch their grandparents die through a glass window by saying, oh, he goes to jail for a year.
01:27:08.000But I mean, the larger justice is structural reform.
01:27:12.000I mean, if you shut down a mafia, but the mafia boss escapes to some island in a non extradition country, the problem is we don't want something like this to happen again.
01:27:23.000And we want to root out the structural problems that were exposed by this whole thing happening.
01:27:29.000And, for example, there have been some very big structural changes.
01:27:33.000Just shut down USAID, shut down USAID, which arguably created this.
01:27:38.000And for example, at NIH with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, you know, cut tens of millions of dollars of grants to do social media control around mis and disinformation around public health threats.
01:27:51.000That was something that, you know, was part of the cover up was the censorship of being able to talk about it.
01:28:00.000So no one could dispute something like the Proximal Origins paper.
01:28:03.000To dispute it was to have a terms of service violation on the tech platforms, which was flagged by tens of thousands of government funded censors.
01:28:11.000And we've cut all that grant funding, and we've sent a very powerful message to future aspiring professional censors.
01:28:20.000You lose one election, and there goes all you're going to, you know, you're going to have to get a service job in the gig economy because we are not in that business anymore.
01:28:29.000We've done structural reform to the way NIH and HHS grants work like that.
01:28:34.000And if you do that across a number of layers, you know, I think you can get to a point where there's a general feeling of accountability.
01:28:42.000But I don't think that we're fully there yet.
01:29:28.000But there are other layers to this, like the one that I said about the Chinese speaking fee sort of comedy moment, which is when the CIA stonewalls Sandra Paul, when ODI, when a government agency is not responding to requests for transparency on this.
01:29:48.000The White House could force that to happen.
01:29:53.000Hey, make public everything about COVID.
01:29:56.000Hey, you're not turning over these documents, turn them over.
01:30:02.000There are things that could be done on this that are not outside.
01:30:09.000The point that I'm making, at least as far as the midterms and more broadly, go ahead.
01:30:14.000Sorry, just to complete this point, think about what happened with Senator Paul's hearing.
01:30:19.000With the CIA whistleblower on COVID around Fauci interference in the intelligence community.
01:30:25.000This, if you can pull it up, actually, the, if you just, you can probably find this through Google by saying CIA Spock's S P O X, like X, and then Twitter or X account, like response to Rand Paul CIA whistleblower hearing.
01:30:59.000So, this was the CIA whistleblower who was working on, I believe, the COVID public health analyst type stuff, who basically reported about, told the Rand Pauls committee in a public hearing about how Tony Fauci personally intervened and pressured the intelligence community to change its assessment about the lab leak.
01:31:26.000And then various elements of the intelligence community assessment about COVID were.
01:31:32.000Personally manipulated by Fauci and his minions.
01:31:35.000And this just happened, what was this, May, two months ago?
01:31:40.000And so that was spearheaded by the legislative branch, Chairman Paul.
01:31:46.000But the executive branch, which is the administration, the official response to the CIA around this hearing was to attack the legislative branch for having a public hearing.
01:32:00.000That was the last tweet that they actually put up.
01:32:02.000Back in, that was the most recent tweet they've ever seen.
01:32:06.000The committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing a CIA agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed door testimony from the individual previously.
01:32:16.000The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul.
01:32:23.000This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing.
01:32:28.000As the CIA has already assessed, COVID 19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.
01:32:46.000It was about how Dr. Fauci and his minions personally intervened on the CIA and ODI at the time in order to change their hypothesis about it being a lab leak.
01:32:58.000It's more evidence for the very thing that they are disingenuously claiming that it somehow undermines.
01:33:05.000Of course, it's not undermining it, but what it does is it reflects poorly on the agency.
01:33:10.000About how the agency acted as a political instrument, operating at the behest of political pressure from the Fauci establishment rather than making an independent assessment of what caused COVID.
01:33:22.000But that's an executive branch agency.
01:33:24.000That is not something that is outside the control or influence of the administration.
01:33:30.000They report directly to the White House.
01:33:32.000And so the picture is complicated on that front.
01:33:36.000I understand what you're saying, but the point that I'm making is when you're offered a binary choice, Right.
01:33:42.000And your options are either Republicans and at this particular context, your Republican representative or your Democrat representative or staying home.
01:34:05.000To Josie's point, the like what Josie was saying, the option about the Steve Bannon option, you know, he declines to show up, you hit him with contempt charges.
01:34:15.000100% of Democrats are going to back Fauci on that.
01:34:18.000And you're going to have enough Republicans to get over the threshold.
01:34:22.000You're going, like, for example, John Cornyn just is holding up the Senate nominations for ambassador of Doug Mastriano and Kerry Lake right now until the Trump administration administers the PEPFAR funds, the USAID PEPFAR money, you know, so basically in Africa.
01:34:42.000So he's basically, so you have a Republican senator from Texas.
01:34:48.000Saying that he is not going to allow Kerry Lake or Doug Mastriano, two MAGA stalwarts, to become U.S. ambassadors until the Trump administration administers U.S. aid money for AIDS in Africa.
01:36:13.000You know, at the end of the day, if they decide not to go or to abstain or to vote with Democrats, the White House can't get anything done.
01:36:21.000There's not a large enough majority of MAGA folks.
01:36:26.000And that's to my broader point, right?
01:36:29.000So after the midterms, If the Republicans were to lose the House, because they're probably going to keep the Senate, it still looks like that.
01:36:37.000But if they were to lose the House, all advances stop.
01:36:43.000The House of Representatives, they're going to start doing the impeach Trump.
01:36:48.000They're going to start doing everything they kind of do.
01:36:54.000So I guess my broader point is it's like when you've got a bad option or a worse option, You and you have a binary choice.
01:37:03.000You like to say, well, we didn't because all the stuff you listed that Trump has done in the administration, right?
01:37:09.000Like just the USAID cuts, that's a huge thing, right?
01:37:14.000Like all the stuff that they attempted to do with Doge, they didn't get even a majority of it, but they did make some cuts with Doge.
01:37:22.000And there's a lot of things that we've talked about here tonight that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for a Republican administration coming in, if it wasn't for Donald Trump.
01:37:36.000Was given immunity or pardoned, you know, that was probably not even by Joe Biden.
01:37:42.000It was by someone in his administration that actually, you know, probably signed with the auto pen or at least told him that he should because, you know, we don't know exactly how much Joe Biden knew from day to day what was going on.
01:37:55.000And so I understand being upset with Trump, but the way that people, you know, characterize Trump as doing nothing and that is just flatly wrong.
01:38:06.000And when you've got a binary choice, you know, you're, you're, You're looking at a situation of like, look, you can go with bad or you can go with worse.
01:38:13.000I don't think, and Josie, maybe if you want to, I feel like I've been talking a lot.
01:38:20.000I'll just say one thing and then I'll just like.
01:38:49.000It's that the things that have affirmatively been done and that are good and things that have affirmatively been done that are bad is sort of in the crosshairs.
01:38:59.000And I think that the key issue for that demographic of sort of MAGA voters in 2024 as they go into 2026 are right now shaping up to be issues around sort of the.
01:39:12.000Is pro Israel foreign policy side on the right versus the woke wokeness stuff on the left?
01:39:20.000And there is that choice that that demographic is sort of faced with where it's they don't like the Democrats, they don't like the woke stuff, but they also do not like a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and Section 219 and an Iran war and, you know, Section 622 and the like.
01:39:40.000And so they are sort of caught in this crosshairs where they don't like this direction.
01:40:09.000Are the libertarians in a position where they're like, well, the Democrats suck and the Republicans suck, so we're just going to stay home?
01:40:16.000Because I remember back in 2004, 2008, Everybody hated George Bush.
01:40:38.000So do you think, you know, being tapped into the libertarians far more than I am nowadays, like, do you think libertarians are most likely to just stay home?
01:40:48.000Or do you think that they're actually going to say, well, I really, really don't like the.
01:41:00.000Libertarians won't vote with Democrats largely.
01:41:03.000They will either vote for their third party as like a protest vote or they will stay home.
01:41:09.000Because what we have, when you vote Republican or Democrat right now, the way libertarians see it, you get a gay war or you get a holy war.
01:41:17.000So the choice is which would I rather?
01:41:18.000Would I rather have the holy war that's going to lead us into the second coming and the end of the world?
01:41:24.000Or do I want the gay war where, you know, they're like, we remember the last 10 years, we were being silenced.
01:41:32.000There was a censorship to a level we've never seen.
01:41:37.000Like everybody didn't know what gender they were.
01:41:39.000And we still have some of that, but it's like people are waking up and we're seeing that with the main election where the Nazi didn't quite work out.
01:41:46.000So now we're going to try this guy that thinks he's a woman and is clearly not.
01:42:09.000I want him to go to this, especially to the Senate, where like everybody's got their nose in the air and they think they're so special, you know?
01:43:14.000But like those stories feel like a distraction now.
01:43:16.000Like when we get into stuff about gender politics, especially in sports, it's important, but it feels like for a lot of people, it's politically distracting because the general public has made their thoughts on it fairly clear.
01:43:29.000And while these debates are still going on, it doesn't feel as expedient or as necessary as talking about what's going on perhaps in Iran because it's affecting our gas prices, our ability to get around, your business has suffered.
01:43:43.000So you really are caught between two choices that are really bad.
01:43:46.000Now, the one we were talking about that was going on during the Biden administration, that felt like it hit us more at home because it was all encompassing in your way of life, whereas one of them seems to be tied more to your pocket.
01:43:57.000I mean, you could be talking about nuclear proliferation and maybe it's the end of the world, but we've been dealing with wars in the Middle East for as long as any of us has been alive.
01:44:06.000All of that being said, the other stuff felt closer to home, but it now feels like it's more in our rear view, even though it's.
01:44:12.000Probably always going to be this omnipresent thing that will make a comeback after somebody spends a term in office, things change.
01:44:41.000So if you're going to vote for a libertarian, you're going to vote for them in your school board, you're going to vote for them for your sheriff, you're going to vote for them in your select board.
01:44:46.000And those Are the libertarians that are going to get into office?
01:44:48.000If you do the protest vote, they're never going to get into office because back with Perot, when he was a spoiler, they were like, oh no, we can never have this happen again.
01:44:57.000So in the future, libertarians or any third party are going to need to have five polls where you get 15%, and we're going to choose those polls.
01:45:07.000So it's designed so that libertarians can never compete.
01:45:10.000And it's very hard because you're going to have the DSA candidates down there winning the elections and getting the laws changed.
01:45:23.000All right, we're going to go to one last story here.
01:45:25.000From the New York Post, a New York City attacker yelled Allahu Akbar as he randomly stabbed two men near Central Park, according to victim witness, says the commission.
01:45:35.000Two men were stabbed in an unprovoked rampage on the Upper West Side near Central Park on Thursday afternoon by a deranged attacker yelling Allahu Akbar during both attacks, police commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
01:45:47.000Investigators were probing whether the suspect, Raul Morales, 51, was motivated by hate, though Tisch said.
01:45:54.000Tish also said the initial investigation suggests that the mental health may have been a factor.
01:45:59.000Detectives are continuing to work the case and determine motive, but according to victim and witness statements, Morales yelled, Allahu Akbar, meaning God is the greatest in Arabic during both attacks, the top cop said in a statement.
01:46:11.000The NYPD is currently evaluating whether this is a potential hate crime, she wrote.
01:46:16.000Is it possible or is it likely that nowadays, because of the internet and because of the U.S. involvement so heavily in the Middle East for the past 20 years, do you think that that?
01:46:28.000That this kind of exclamation is like a meme because I do see people that are, I mean, even Donald Trump, you know, I think he said inshallah, you know, and it's weak.
01:46:38.000And the point that I'm making is, you know, I see people in it that are, you know, not Muslims saying inshallah all the time on the internet because of the meme for it, you know, like it's, it's a, you know, it's a meme.
01:46:50.000Does the meme make it all the way to Stabby Stab?
01:46:52.000I don't know if it makes it all the way to that.
01:46:54.000I think the Stabby Stab comes from Crazy Guy, but Crazy Guy's meme.
01:46:58.000Yeah, but, you know, it's a crazy guy.
01:48:06.000I think this is unlikely to be actually terrorism.
01:48:09.000I do think that it's kind of like a crazy dude that was just like, you know, honestly, he was, as gross as it is, he was memeing because this kind of, these kind of things, if you're at all on the internet, you see these kind of things all the time with people just saying things because they, you know, it's become part of the national consciousness or whatever.
01:48:39.000I would go further than Josie and say, not just get rid of the concept of a hate crime, but get rid of the concept of a mental health defense.
01:49:04.000Like, why is it baked into our legal system to show that type of compassion?
01:49:08.000The argument is they don't actually know what they're doing.
01:49:11.000And with The proper mental health treatment, they could reintegrate into society and be a normal person.
01:49:16.000But unfortunately, they do the same thing with pedophiles.
01:49:19.000Well, that's just have a little, you know, they just need to help some help.
01:49:22.000That's a whole different topic that deserves a whole different means of punishment.
01:49:28.000And pedophilia shouldn't be treated as if it's a mental illness.
01:49:31.000It's treated like it's a mental illness.
01:49:33.000But when it comes to, you know, the argument of, oh, you know, these people, once they get actual, you know, the help that they need, then they can go back into society.
01:49:42.000But one of the things that you see consistently with People that are struggling with mental illness, especially if they're severely mentally ill like this, you give people medication and they start taking their medication and then they feel better.
01:49:55.000And then, invariably, and not all the time, of course, but very often, people start thinking, I don't need this anymore because I'm okay now.
01:50:05.000Now I don't need to take my medication.
01:50:07.000They stop taking the medication and then the condition returns because it's not something that goes away with medication.
01:50:12.000The medication treats the symptoms, it treats whatever the mental illness is.
01:50:17.000It doesn't actually fix a person that has a mental illness.
01:50:22.000It doesn't make the mental illness actually go away.
01:50:25.000It's the medication, you know, changing the way they perceive the world.
01:50:29.000So putting people on medication and just saying, okay, go back into the world, you have to have someone that monitors them, make sure that they're taking their medication.
01:50:37.000And when you're dealing with what frequently happens is people that are homeless or drug users, like that kind of thing, the people that are mentally ill and homeless and drug users, it's a Venn diagram that gets real close to a circle.
01:50:51.000I used to date a girl that was in the nursing field as a prescriber and stuff, and she dealt with a lot of people that were.
01:50:59.000Mentally ill, and that's what happened.
01:51:01.000It would be, you know, they would get them into the facility, they would give them medication, the medication would work, they would feel better, and then they'd be let loose again.
01:51:09.000And then three, four months later, they were back because they stopped taking their medication, started using drugs again.
01:51:16.000Um, so the idea that you can have someone that's very mentally ill and be like, okay, well, now you can go back into society like that is just as bad as taking someone that's incredibly violent and saying, okay, you can go back into society.
01:51:31.000People talk about the point of You know, incarceration is to rehabilitate them.
01:51:40.000The point of it is to take the people that are dangerous and can't function in society out of society.
01:51:47.000Now, it's, you know, it may be a hard pill for some people to swallow.
01:51:51.000And sure, there are people that make mistakes and end up in jail because they did something dumb that they don't normally do, but, or they wouldn't normally do under normal conditions.
01:52:00.000But the fact of the matter is, the point of incarceration is to take dangerous people out of society.
01:52:06.000And put them somewhere where they can't hurt other people.
01:52:10.000And to treat it, to treat people that are mentally ill differently than you treat someone that has a recidivism for violent attacks, that's a bad policy.
01:52:24.000Whether you be a person that just can't control your temper and attacks people for no reason or is just likely to attack someone because you're a violent person, or if you're a person that's mentally ill and the voices told you to stab that guy.
01:52:39.000For everyone else in society, it's the same.
01:52:42.000It doesn't matter why you did it, just like we're talking about hate crimes.
01:52:45.000It doesn't matter that you did it because you don't like the way this person looks or you don't like this person's background or whatever.
01:52:54.000You still committed a violent act and you can't know someone else's mind, you can't know their thoughts.
01:52:59.000So the solution is you go to jail and we take you out of society.
01:53:17.000They can be abused in the same way that jail can be abused.
01:53:19.000Well, not only that, I mean, the way that, you know, historically, the way that communist countries would get rid of people they didn't like is they would say, oh, he's a crazy person.
01:53:30.000Look, he's talking about these crazy ideas.
01:53:32.000Like, you know, he's talking out against the party.
01:53:39.000Well, you see them doing this with COSA and the Kids Online Safety Act type thing, where they're making an argument.
01:53:48.000Basically, the kids should be banned from social media or should have certain access restrictions, or there should be platform accountability for algorithms that have addictive content.
01:53:59.000But all they mean, if you listen, like this lawsuit being led against Facebook by the state of California, I mean, Gavin Newsom's wife basically gave the game away about why they're bringing the lawsuits because her kids were watching Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
01:54:17.000But they're cloaking it as a mental health problem.
01:54:19.000They're basically saying it's a mental health problem.
01:54:22.000You know, if you listen to right wing conservative aligned content, and that the platforms have to be punished for allowing a basically competitive marketplace of ideas because the wrong ideas give kids mental health problems.
01:54:36.000Their platforms aren't strong enough, so they make our platforms illegal.
01:54:40.000You know, one of the things that, and I do think that there should be asylums, right?
01:54:44.000I do think that when it comes to people that are, you know, that are violent and mentally ill, they should be removed from society.
01:54:50.000They probably shouldn't go to regular prison because.
01:54:54.000Then they're just going to be violent in regular prison, making regular prison even worse.
01:54:59.000But one of the things that I think is a significant concern is you'll see people on the left, if they get into positions of authority and power, they'll go after religious people.
01:55:13.000They'll say, Your religion is a crazy person religion.
01:55:16.000The way that you, you know, normal Christians or normal people don't think this, like, and so your religion makes you, you know, makes you suspect.
01:55:26.000I mean, The Biden administration had already been targeting religious people and stuff.
01:56:20.000All right, we're going to go to super chat.
01:56:21.000So, why don't you smash the like button, share the show with your friends, head on over to rumble.com and become a member there, join Rumble so that way you can watch the after show and then head on.
01:56:30.000Head on over to timcast.com and join the discord so you can call in.
01:56:34.000But right now, we're going to go ahead and read some of your rumble rants and super chats.
01:57:40.000They're trying to say, is it good or is it bad, so that I can cross this off the list of something that I am concerned about, so that I can focus on something else or I can put this to bed and there's no longer any tension in my head about what this thing is.
01:57:56.000You will never get to a point where there is no tension on this issue, whether it's about intelligence collection, whether it's about covert action, whether it's about hawks or doves in terms of America's role in global leadership and what we need to do.
01:58:18.000It's a dirty world out there, and dirty work sometimes has to get done in order to protect ourselves or in order to stay ahead of problems or in order to shift the balance of power in various places or regions or industries or whatever.
01:58:31.000And the attempt to label the whole thing good or bad is an attempt to relieve the tension on the board that you feel having to juggle all these things.
01:58:42.000But if you just recognize that this is just a chessboard with a lot of pieces on it and just try to understand the pieces and make your own judgment about any particular piece, the answer will sort of come to you any given month or any given period of your life where you agree or disagree with what it's doing.
01:59:02.000And be guided by the reforms that you seek to make rather than a top down good evil.
01:59:09.000And this is something I mention on our show a lot.
01:59:11.000This is why the CIA propaganda arm has spent so much time in Hollywood because they want to give the uninitiated and the people who don't have the will to look super closely into it a generic feeling of positivity that they're working towards U.S. interests, which generically means your interests, which is why they've been working with Hollywood to help the.
02:00:23.000From Taylor says The roundup suit failed because they were being sued for something they aren't required to do and state law can't override federal law.
02:00:31.000You don't want states making laws targeting companies they don't like.
02:01:06.000It depends on how far they've gone initially and what you're.
02:01:11.000Thoughts are on, you know, the like, for instance, the Punisher kills a lot of bad guys, but it depends on whether you think that that's justified.
02:01:19.000Are you a strong proponent of the legal system that these people go be put in front of a judge?
02:01:23.000Like Daredevil will, you know, it's like Batman, right?
02:01:27.000He doesn't matter how many times he brings them to Arkham Asylum, they're going to get out and kill a bunch of people.
02:01:31.000There are a lot of people that are okay with him.
02:01:34.000He never does, you know, at least not when he's in the proper timeline, making that decision, but the anti heroes will.
02:01:40.000And so it's a matter of personal preference.
02:01:43.000I don't know what the body count is on Deadpool or Wolverine, but either of those two, they don't have a problem with killing the bad guys.
02:01:50.000You could say that an anti hero can act heroically.
02:01:53.000I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
02:01:55.000If, in fact, a lot of it would end up being that they learn to make those choices as it goes on.
02:02:00.000A more interesting story is to see an anti hero shed that skin and become a hero in the eyes of the public.
02:02:06.000I don't know why you can't just give Batman or Superman a law enforcement badge and just deputize them to use lethal force against people who are using lethal force.
02:02:15.000Like, why don't they just, I mean, it won't?
02:02:18.000Well, from a storytelling perspective, it's not as interesting.
02:03:33.000Also, if you are a member of the Timcast Discord, I do shows twice a month at 7 p.m. doing small shows, cover a couple of topics, hang out with you guys.
02:08:19.000But the thing is, I'm on this show every day and I'm not critical enough of Israel because I'm just kind of like they're 6,000 miles away and I don't really worry about them much.
02:08:29.000So, the left say that I'm a genocide, a pretendicide enabler, and the right says that I'm a Jewish shill.
02:09:31.000I mean, I don't worry about other wars that are going on around the world.
02:09:35.000I have my own opinions on what the situation with Iran is.
02:09:41.000And you can read about it on my Patreon.
02:09:43.000The day the strike started, I wrote a piece on what I really thought about the.
02:09:47.000The strikes on Iran and how, like, what the whole geopolitical situation for that was.
02:09:55.000I don't believe that the U.S. is going to war for Israel.
02:09:59.000I don't believe that there is a genocide in Gaza.
02:10:03.000And I'm not particularly partial to the Palestinian plight because, well, I mean, there's a lot of terrorists in Gaza, or there was a lot of terrorists in Gaza.
02:10:14.000So for me, it's like I'm not really interested in either side.
02:10:17.000Do you believe that the Iran war is a net positive?
02:10:47.000And really, it boils down to, in my opinion, they're doing their best to.
02:10:53.000They don't want to actually go kinetic with China, at least right now, we don't.
02:10:58.000And so they're doing their best to slow China's ability to make war and to engage in any kind of kinetic activities.
02:11:06.000What Mike was talking about when the Super Chat came in about whether you like or dislike or how you feel about the CIA is how I feel a lot about foreign policy in the absence of like, you know, when you come on here and people have this deep understanding of the way things work with American foreign policy, how it relates to war.
02:11:25.000And I don't run under the idea that, you know, just.
02:11:30.000All war bad all the time because I understand that America has to put America's own interests first.
02:11:35.000And not to say that I want war, but it's just I don't feel comfortable having that discussion or advocating for anything like that.
02:11:43.000Because, like, look, they're not asking me to go fight.
02:11:46.000I was born deaf in one ear and it would have never been able to, you know, enter the military anyways.
02:11:53.000But I also understand that America needs to put its own interests first.
02:11:56.000So it's always one of those things where I'm never truly comfortable having those discussions because I see a lot of people who have very nuanced perspectives on all of these things.
02:12:04.000And I'm like, look, I don't know if I'm the person that you're going to come to for an answer on this.
02:12:46.000I mean, there was Calvin Coolidge, who obviously was the most libertarian of all, but when it comes to the founding fathers, the most libertarian would have been Thomas Jefferson by a long shot.
02:13:00.000Sophie Cunningham says it's common sense to keep trans athletes out of women's sports.
02:13:05.000Indianapolis, Indiana fever guard Sophie Cunningham doubled down Wednesday on comments she made in a recently published ESPN article saying it's common sense.
02:13:13.000To bar transgender athletes from competing in women's sports.
02:13:16.000In the ESPN article, Cunningham said she wanted to protect young girls in the locker room and that they shouldn't have to go against biological men.
02:13:54.000The participation of transgender athletes in sports has become an increasingly politicized issue, with the Supreme Court recently upholding individual state bans on trans athletes competing in sports alongside cisgender athletes.
02:14:05.000Just the fact that they use the term cisgender, I'm not particularly sure.
02:14:32.000The best thing they can do in these situations is to not turn her into like a right wing spokesperson.
02:14:38.000We need more people because she said, she's very Riley Gaines.
02:14:41.000She says, I'm not political for the most part.
02:14:43.000She cares about this issue and she does more good for the issue by caring about this one and not having to do like, Ads for Patriot Dirt or something like that.
02:14:52.000Like, as soon as you become like a spokesman or a figure for a political cause, then you're dismissed out of hand by people who are, first of all, those who are already extremely politically radicalized.
02:15:03.000But even the ones who are not will look at the fact that you're now some type of avatar for an entire political movement and they can dismiss your thoughts out of hand.
02:15:12.000I think that she's more powerful having this issue that she'll speak on when it comes up.
02:15:16.000But otherwise, she stays out of it because it doesn't matter to her.
02:16:10.000She's all county and she's offensive player of the year and she's MVP and she's excellent and she's got two SEC schools looking at her and she just visited Stetson, you know.
02:16:22.000So, when it comes to boys and girls sports, I say, get out of my daughter's sport.
02:16:33.000Yeah, I mean, look, I think that everyone, at least everyone here at Timcast generally, is of the opinion that trans women, dudes, shouldn't be playing in girls' sports.
02:16:48.000I think, especially when it comes to kids, you know, but I think just overall.
02:16:54.000There have been over, as of last year, the count was over 900 accolades taken from girls and given to boys.
02:17:01.000And that includes scholarships, that includes trophies, that includes titles.
02:17:05.000I mean, I'm all for taking things from women, but you know, that's fair.
02:17:11.000I just think the nonchalantness of this is really important.
02:17:14.000Like, I think the fact that she didn't feel like she had to turn it into more than it was, she didn't try to stand on a bunch of other ideas.
02:17:21.000She's simply stating it as Phil, you were saying something the other day about when people bring up voter ID and they try to join them on the playing field they're on, you're just giving them leverage by even entertaining the discussion.
02:17:53.000But the point is, like, if you engage with people that make arguments like that, you're giving their argument credibility by saying, this is something I need to defend myself from.
02:18:05.000You're a reasonable person and you're making a reasonable argument.
02:20:42.000So, how Russia and China exert soft power are slightly different.
02:20:49.000China, I think, is much more sophisticated.
02:20:53.000Russia's primary means of soft power is through financial entanglements between Russian oligarchs and comparable oligarchs in partnered countries.
02:21:07.000So, for example, one of the ways that the Cold War reignited in the early 2000s was through European dependence on Russian oil and gas, which allowed Russia to reassert soft power influence.
02:21:27.000Over countries, be they Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkan countries, and the like, because the transit revenue from the natural gas being sourced in Russia made a lot of people in those countries rich.
02:21:46.000And because of Russian oil exports, it makes a lot of people rich in foreign countries that are effectively importing Russian oil.
02:21:58.000Or whose businesses depend on that Russian oil.
02:22:01.000And so we call that financial or economic soft power projection.
02:22:08.000Now, we use that as well, economic soft power, in myriad ways.
02:22:15.000But that is, I would argue, Russia's primary means of doing it at an impactful level, which is to say that capturing a foreign country's oligarchs by effectively getting them on direct or indirect payroll makes.
02:22:32.000Powerful figures in that country, economically entangled, dependent, and supportive of pro Russian narratives, interests, the like.
02:22:44.000We incorporate that, but we also incorporate a much more expansive informational soft power, institutional soft power, human soft power networks on the ground.
02:22:55.000We go after the labor unions, the media organizations, the public health ecosystems.
02:23:03.000The education systems, the court systems, rule of law, the legislative, the executive, the judicial branches of the government, full spectrum.
02:23:14.000And that is because we've invested a lot more in that institution building, whereas Russia does not have very robust institution building.
02:23:24.000They don't have huge networks of NGOs, nonprofit organizations, think tanks that do, for example, Now, China is much more sophisticated in that way than Russia.
02:23:38.000China has a version light, I would say, of what we have.
02:23:45.000Primarily, the way China really captures a country, if you look at Africa, for example, through debt trap diplomacy or through financial entanglements that are not necessarily about building a powerful oligarch who's got a lot of clout, for example, in Romania or Bulgaria, but what they will do is.
02:24:05.000Basically, build roads, ports, and then take in infrastructure.
02:24:11.000And now that's something that we do as well, but China has focused on that.
02:24:19.000And in particular, because they don't have to spend as much on hard power, they don't have 800 military bases.
02:24:25.000And they've also not incurred, because they're soft power, they do what I call value based diplomacy as opposed to values based diplomacy.
02:24:37.000We will do that sort of thing, but we will.
02:24:41.000We will make it a quid pro quo that in addition to us getting an equity interest in some port or us having some easement to some land with minerals or the like or some trade deal being struck, we will also impose various soft power conditions like you have to reverse your ban on gay marriage.
02:25:03.000And so we use values based diplomacy nominally as a soft power exertion because it tilts the hearts and minds, at least in theory, towards a sort of Western orbit.
02:25:14.000And off of a sort of Russian Chinese heteronormative, et cetera.
02:25:21.000We fold values into it, but that also causes a lot of resentment.
02:25:24.000Whereas when the Chinese go in, they will have this economic soft power, but since they don't force a structural, cultural, sort of heritage reorganization of the country's values, it's a raw value play.
02:25:39.000And we find ourselves in China sort of outgunned diplomatically, frankly.
02:25:44.000I remember when I got to the State Department.
02:25:47.000And one of my roles was chairing basically the U.S. government position on the International Telecommunications Union and being briefed by my deputy that we were only fighting for parity with China and to sort of neutralize Chinese initiatives there because we didn't have really the votes to take an aggressive posture because all 54 countries in the African Union were siding with the Chinese delegation on this.
02:26:17.000And so I guess that was the first part of your question the differences that.
02:26:21.000Your second question was about the great power competition aspect?
02:26:28.000Because I've noticed recently in Europe, especially, there's been a lot of changes in how everybody's positioning themselves in relation to different powers globally.
02:26:38.000So, kind of ties into the last part of my.
02:26:41.000I wanted to add this as well, just to tie it into this.
02:26:43.000So, do you think at this point Europe is actually an independent actor at any level?
02:27:02.000Yeah, I've heard people sort of banty about that framework about sovereign versus non sovereign, independent versus non independent countries.
02:27:12.000I don't find that to be a particularly useful framing.
02:27:14.000I mean, every I would argue it's hard not to see the United States.
02:27:19.000I mean, who's independent in the United States?
02:27:22.000I don't know that countries really make decisions because it's in their national interests.
02:27:26.000I think that the politically appointed representatives deal with a diverse set of interests between voters and donors.
02:27:36.000Often represent the interests of donors over voters.
02:27:40.000And what you have is basically a stakeholder soup to which politicians are dependent on, even in nominally independent countries.
02:27:47.000And oftentimes that involves foreign actors as well, or oligarchs that provide an institutional or amplification or financial support base and the like.
02:27:58.000But certainly the EU, because of hostilities with the Trump administration under term one and term two, Is trying to pivot off of the US alliance in certain core respects, not the least of which there's a digital strategic autonomy initiative around their tech stack.
02:28:42.000All of its gas to Europe because of the US led sanctions in 2014, combined with the EU heavy adoption of that and the support for the war against Russia and the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines and the like.
02:28:57.000Russia is constructing natural gas to sell to China instead.
02:29:03.000And these gas pipelines are 30 year marriages.
02:29:05.000And so China gets the benefit of extremely cheap, basically discounted.
02:29:12.000Gas that used to be cheap gas for Europe.
02:29:15.000And so I think that you've seen, you know, a kind of, I don't want to say new Sino Soviet alliance, but, you know, the war on Russia has basically made, I think, Russia and China closer.
02:29:31.000They still have a lot of, you know, differences, distinctions in their own conflicts.
02:29:35.000But, you know, certainly I think just out of economic necessity, especially with the secondary sanctions and the like that have been.
02:29:45.000China is increasingly a customer of Russia, which creates its own oligarch to oligarch relationships, whereas China also has a lot more international latitude.
02:29:54.000And so I can see the EU pivoting to China, Canada pivoting to China, a lot of NATO partners pivoting to China rather than the US.
02:30:05.000And that's one of the sensitivities diplomatically in terms of our crackdown.
02:30:08.000How far can you push Europe before they turn to China?
02:31:28.000Well, I mean, think about the Hungary situation.
02:31:30.000Like, since we were just talking about the great power sort of play there, Hungary turned to China in primary part because of the EU and Democrat, you know, sort of pressure and sort of neocon pressure on the Orban government.
02:31:47.000And so China was, whereas China represents kind of a counterpart trading partner for the EU, sorry, against the United States, countries like.
02:32:01.000Hungary turned to China because their funds, they had $38 billion locked up in the EU and various pressures being put on them from the US government and USAID.
02:32:11.000And so China really is a very flexible swing player that way.
02:32:15.000And they are good in the business of, I mean, think about even the state of California.
02:32:22.000I mean, China is in many respects bailing out many parts of the California state budget.
02:32:28.000San Francisco solved its homeless problem in one weekend when the Chinese economic delegation came.
02:32:33.000Because of that interplay, I think they see that as an opportunity to get their own sort of interests represented and get access to various ports and infrastructure and soft power nodes.
02:34:42.000And we get a big, you know, big check.
02:34:45.000And there's a friend of mine's band that's, I believe they're currently over there or they're going over there shortly.
02:34:52.000And I, Imagine the offer was substantial, just like ours.
02:34:57.000So, I think that you're probably, you know, you're probably, or this probably aligns with what you're talking about about soft power, you know, Russia trying to reach out and do soft power stuff.
02:35:08.000I've now done 16 hours of subscriber content on the CIA and the music industry and how we do the exact same thing with these international concerts and, you know, especially in the music industry and the intelligence world.
02:35:21.000And I'll put clips of it on my main timeline, but I've This is, I love this subject so much.
02:35:26.000People accuse me of being a Fed because I'm in a metal band that tours.
02:35:30.000Like, they're like, oh, you know, you're a Fed.
02:35:33.000You're the CIA started Rockstars and blah, blah, blah.
02:35:36.000And it's like, well, look, I mean, just because the CIA had a hand in this kind of stuff doesn't mean that every band that ever goes on tour is actually a Fed.
02:35:46.000Remember when Bono played in the tunnels of Ukraine, like played underground for Ukraine, and we're supposed to think that's not propaganda to get us to support the war?
02:35:54.000I ain't going to Ukraine either, as long as there's a war going on.
02:35:58.000When the war ends and there's a real armistice or something where they're not shooting at each other, then we'll talk about going to those parts of Europe.
02:36:07.000The other issue around the Russia thing is having that on your passport at this moment when the Democrats.
02:36:18.000That's an immediate counterintelligence threat in the eyes of the Southern District of New York and the entrenched sort of FBI careers where the moment power snaps back the other way.
02:36:33.000They investigated Trump for his real estate dealings in Russia in the 1980s when he was the president in 2017.
02:36:41.000And not only that, our European booking agent said, look, if you go do this, there are other booking agents and festivals that will not book you.
02:38:33.000I hate using that word, but there's a lot of misinformation on social media talking about, oh, it's giving up sovereignty and it's merging our militaries.
02:38:41.000And that's complete and utter horseshit.
02:39:50.000So what it does do, it gives Israel nothing, but it gives us access to Iron Dome.
02:39:56.000Iron Beam and David Sling, and some other tech that the Israelis have that we don't.
02:40:02.000And it gives us the opportunity to produce these systems domestically, which gives us control of the supply line and lets us augment American industry, right?
02:40:14.000There are a lot of things that Israel has advances in that we don't like anti tunneling technology, which we already covered.
02:40:25.000I've covered everything you've said so far.
02:40:27.000I've covered everything you've said so far.
02:40:29.000My key issue was around the interoperability and path dependency problem.
02:41:03.000So I see the interoperability and path dependency problems as being interrelated.
02:41:09.000What you're doing is you're building it into our supply chain.
02:41:12.000You're building basically foreign military industrial complex sourced technology, military tools, weapons systems into our dependencies for deploying.
02:41:30.000And operationalizing our military tech stack.
02:41:35.000This allows someone else in the chain besides our own sovereign government to have input and influence over our ability to actually use our own weapon systems.
02:41:47.000I gave the analogy, if you recall, around Anthropic and the difficulty that the Pentagon currently has around revamping our AI because over basically three years of the Biden administration, you had.
02:42:05.000And given the conflicts between Anthropic and the Trump administration, the Pentagon cannot quickly or easily or cheaply revamp its AI systems.
02:42:14.000It can't get Anthropic out because it's had several years of deep entrenchment within all of our systems.
02:42:21.000There is an interoperability problem that that has caused.
02:42:24.000So we can't just go with another contractor and just quickly shift everything without major, expensive, difficult overhauls of the whole thing.
02:42:34.000And in addition, What that allows Anthropic to do is make various decisions because we're reliant on its tech stack.
02:42:43.000It has a vote in our ability to operationalize those systems.
02:42:49.000Now, I actually think, and this happened, for example, with our autonomous kill drones, right?
02:42:54.000Anthropic said it does not want, it basically said that the Pentagon cannot use Claude's systems to be able to autonomously kill people, with Claude just making the You know, the kill decision.
02:43:10.000Now, I actually thought that was a good thing.
02:43:13.000I don't like the idea of AI determining whether or not, you know, someone should live or die.
02:43:18.000I do think there should be a human in the chain.
02:43:20.000But in that case, the Pentagon wanted the autonomous kill system.
02:43:25.000And Anthropic held it up and said, no, we're just not going to let you do that.
02:43:29.000We're not going to allow Claude to be used that way.
02:43:32.000And there was a big court dispute and there was a big contract dispute.
02:43:35.000What happens when it's a sovereign, when it's a foreign government?
02:43:39.000That gets the ability to make that decision about intelligence, about targeting, about huge underlying missile defense systems.
02:43:48.000Then, when you are in negotiations with that country or with another country, but that other foreign country has a say in it or wants to intervene, they can threaten all sorts of cooperation, like in that, because you are.
02:44:10.000This is a path that's already been traveled.
02:44:12.000For example, I already covered how those dependencies already exist in many respects because of so much of Israeli tech that's already built into Palestine.
02:44:24.000It's a joint U.S. Norwegian missile defense system, air defense system, right?
02:44:31.000It's actually what protects our capital.
02:44:34.000We have procedural controls, policy controls in place, we have technological controls in place, which one of them being, for example, the risk management framework.
02:44:48.000We do a lot of due diligence and we have technological control in place.
02:44:53.000So, in terms of risk management framework, it's a whole bunch of monumental lists of all these controls, whether technological or procedure or physical security.
02:45:04.000Yeah, dude, we have this with a ton of countries.
02:45:26.000DOD CIO and DSCA have these, and the NSA have these policies and procedures and restrictions in place specifically to protect against any kind of cross domain intrusion.
02:45:38.000So, are you telling me that there's an executive agent who has full Pentagon integration command to make sure that all of our whole tech stack from RD all the way up into operations is.
02:45:55.000Is folded, is done jointly with Norway.
02:46:33.000And what I'm saying is, in the beginning, it will look.
02:46:37.000Relatively benign in the sense that you are nominally helping each other by joining forces and having this kind of fusion at the development and then integration level.
02:46:54.000But that creates a lobby unto itself and it creates dependencies.
02:46:58.000And in the first couple months, it will all look very normal in terms of just an expanded version of what we do one off with other countries.
02:47:07.000But over the course of years, this becomes.
02:47:10.000Whole weapons systems, whole defense systems, whole RD chains, whole AI systems that are inseparable from each other.
02:47:18.000And that creates a huge problem if, say, you don't want to do that anymore or you want to go in a different direction.
02:47:27.000Now, also, this other partner has something over you in any negotiation because you are dependent on them for that.
02:47:35.000And that is something that is one thing when you're doing it with NIH grants, it's another thing when you're doing it with your military.
02:50:50.000Um well, my question is for Mike Benz.
02:50:53.000Um, you recently did like an interview on um on some podcasts or whatever the case was, and you were I.
02:51:00.000I didn't quite understand your position when you were referring to Mike Milli uh, Having a sort of a military strategy or policy or something to that extent.
02:51:23.000He was saying during the Biden era that we should be pushing riots and things of that nature in countries when there are foreign adversaries that are potentially getting involved.
02:51:40.000And potentially things that become threatening to the United States or things that can potentially hurt the US, right?
02:51:49.000So I wanted to hear your perspective from the conversation, aside from that comment you made.
02:51:56.000You went into an example about China and how China had, there was a military member that saw a sign in West Africa that showed how China was trying to get involved with West Africa and how they could potentially build a port.
02:52:13.000And how that was a bad thing for us to intervene with the government due to the economic factors that we were involved with West Africa and we halted their.
02:52:28.000So particularly, is that an issue for you that if the United States is using that type of soft power to try to intervene when China is trying to build ports in these countries to expand their power and their reach?
02:52:44.000The primary reason that I brought up this anecdote, which, you know, just to recap for folks, involved basically the 2021 Special Forces prospectus put out with guidance for the vision of Special Forces operations.
02:52:59.000And what it involved was instigating a race riot between Africans and Chinese in order to block a hypothetical port infrastructure deal that a West African country with access to the Atlantic Ocean would be doing with the government of China if the State Department.
02:53:20.000How could you destabilize the country internally in order to give more leverage to the State Department to convince the African country to block the Chinese deal?
02:53:32.000And what this involved was an information warfare campaign to inflame racial grievances between African workers and Chinese business owners, and then to bring in USAID to give job fairs to the striking workers so that they would be economically motivated to go on strike.
02:53:51.000Against Chinese companies because they would be paid by U.S. tax dollars via U.S. aid rather than by their Chinese employers.
02:53:59.000And that is basically a special forces military operation conducted over multiple theaters, social media, labor unions, political back channeling, international media campaigns, and the like, in order to bring about a political outcome that's not achievable by the State Department alone.
02:54:19.000The reason that I brought that up was not to make a moral good or bad argument about the use of dirty work.
02:54:28.000By the special forces to counter Chinese influence.
02:54:32.000The reason I brought that up primarily was about USAID.
02:54:40.000What you will see on usaspending.gov about that grant is that we are providing economic opportunity in West Africa to impoverished workers, or we're doing some business development.
02:54:57.000We're doing sort of support for local labor unions because of some.
02:55:03.000You know, global universalist humanitarian principle, some pie in the sky, you know, high minded principle about, you know, helping poor people in a foreign country.
02:55:17.000And what you don't actually see is that it's actually a special forces operation where we just need to give tens of thousands of riotous people money to go on the streets and destabilize the country's internal affairs.
02:55:32.000The main reason I was bringing that up was about USAID.
02:55:36.000As a CIA military intelligence front, and that you simply never see that in USAID public facing documents.
02:55:45.000And so that was not about, you know, how hawkish or dovish we should be about Chinese influence.
02:55:54.000It was about, it's basically a thrust around what USAID actually is.
02:56:02.000So then my follow up question to that is how should it be handled?
02:56:08.000If it's not being done by USAID, which by the way, I detest USAID, right?
02:56:15.000But the question is I agree with the outcome and with the, you know, like I'm an American citizen.
02:56:24.000I would like to see these types of things happen because I don't want to see the American hegemony be dismantled, particularly by the CCP, right?
02:56:35.000So, what would be the alternative route to that?
02:56:39.000If it's not being done, if it's not being conducted in the way that it was being done under Billy.
02:56:45.000Well, this gets to a larger question about just how dirty dirty work should be.
02:56:50.000And one of the problems is when you have the Pentagon in the business of racial rent a riots, the deliberate stoking of racially motivated street protests, that in the era of social media and international solidarity movements has a lot of spillover impact into U.S. domestic affairs and the solidarity networks that exist here.
02:57:13.000And in that West African example, there may not be that much spillover when you're inflaming a race war between the Africans and Chinese.
02:57:22.000But what happens, and by the way, it might, but who knows?
02:57:25.000But what happens, for example, when you're doing that in Eastern Europe?
02:57:29.000What happens when you're doing that in Brazil?
02:57:34.000For example, USAID gave just tens of millions of dollars to Afro Brazilians ahead of the Lula election because the black Brazilian population voted disproportionately Lula.
02:57:47.000So we capacity built, and we're doing the same thing in Cuba, by the way.
02:57:58.000At the same time, when I look at something like the USAID and National Endowment for Democracy planning documents to inflame racial tensions between the Afro Cubans and the sort of white Cuban population, angling up grievances around underrepresentation at the higher levels of the Cuban government, I think, gee, you don't think that's going to have any spillover effect in Miami, in Tampa, in.
02:58:27.000In the US, in terms of those, you're going to have all sorts of US domestic politic interchange.
02:58:35.000I mean, we see, for example, Secretary Rubio talking about the interchange of ideas between Cubans and Americans.
02:58:42.000And this, when you have these kind of global news stories around racial conflict, we have these same racial groups in the United States.
02:58:55.000And when this is being done as covert action, When this is being done as a classified, you're not even allowed to know as a U.S. citizen.
02:59:02.000It's illegal for them to even tell you that they're stoking race wars.
02:59:07.000And then you look at these same figures who happen to play very weird roles in racial conflicts here in the United States.
02:59:14.000For example, the BLM destabilization in the summer of 2020 and the actions of Mark Milley there.
02:59:21.000Mark Milley was basically opposed to the president in his handling of the BLM riots, he was Trump's chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
02:59:30.000And you look at the sort of military reticence to try to defuse those or invoke the Insurrection Act in order to actually have enough boots on the ground to deal with those riots.
02:59:42.000I don't like the Pentagon being in the business of deliberately and methodically stoking race riots.
02:59:49.000I think that if you have to use covert action to do that, it has got to be something.
03:00:06.000You know, how about threaten 400% tariffs?
03:00:10.000This sort of work, even though it might be cheaper, even though it might be expedient, even though it might bring about an immediate turn of events, you know, in the country, is a dangerous black, you know, black arts thing to dabble in.
03:00:26.000But frankly, I wasn't even raising that for that purpose.
03:00:29.000I was mostly raising it just to help illustrate.
03:00:56.000If you look at what those people's next jobs are after they leave the Pentagon, they will, like, it is so frequent.
03:01:03.000And this is what we saw basically this whole professional class that is trained in stoking these kinds of riots at USAID, at state, at Pentagon, at CIA came home and formed the 2017 resistance.
03:01:17.000And then, you know, we're involved in everything from BLM to the pussy, you know, pussy hat marches, you know, to everything.
03:01:24.000And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
03:01:27.000When you create a professional class of people who do that, they get their next jobs domestically and bring that here.
03:01:34.000And then the thing that you were doing is black arts.
03:01:37.000To stop a port deal in China suddenly becomes black arts that you're using in Chicago or LA or Baltimore in order to stop authoritarianism at home.
03:04:51.000If there's somebody who's like, who found God, and there's a lot of people, there's a lot of bad actors.
03:04:56.000There's a lot of bad actors who are like, I found God.
03:04:58.000And then they try to have a platform off it after being like a piece of shit their whole life.
03:05:03.000There are a lot of bad actors, but there are a lot of good actors too.
03:05:05.000So, I try to make it a point to give everybody a little bit of grace.
03:05:08.000I don't pull up their old tweets and, you know, like, Try to never forgive them.
03:05:13.000And when they apologize, you accept that apology.
03:05:15.000You know, like when people apologize and you just double down and be like, oh, so you're admitting that you were guilty and there's no grace there.
03:06:40.000So I just feel like I'm safer with the holy war.
03:06:43.000So with the coalition shattered, it's just a demoralized people and they don't have the same priorities as the MAGA coalition where it's just whatever Trump does, we're going to be in line with.
03:06:56.000They have a set of values that don't change with Trump changing.
03:07:01.000So they were non interventionists from the beginning.
03:07:04.000Trump was a non interventionist from the beginning.
03:07:06.000MAGA was a non interventionist from the beginning.
03:07:08.000But the minute they went to war with Iran, MAGA got behind it.
03:07:11.000And the non interventionists were like, I don't get behind this.
03:07:15.000So when it comes to forgiving, I think that that's kind of like a different sort of angle.
03:07:25.000Because you're still kind of waiting to see what happens.
03:07:40.000It's not the way that they see this going.
03:07:43.000And I think if you look at the MAGA coalition, it's very much, I mean, almost everybody in it is in some ways, at least at a significant level, a castaway from an unforgiving.
03:07:59.000Like, I mean, if you think about, I mean, even the early days when you had like the Brett Weinstein Evergreen College affair, I mean, you had a lot of these types of Elon Musk, you know, who was a Democrat, you know, and it was like a lot of people came to MAGA because they were a part of, say, the liberal left or parts of, you know,
03:08:24.000parts of other political pockets that were just totally unforgiving and the purity test was intolerable.
03:08:29.000And they were sort of cast out with no path to redemption, and they ended up on MAGA Island because it was the only place that would accept them and didn't care about the baggage that they had from their activities.
03:08:43.000And I mean, our vice president, JD Vance, was a never-Trumper in 2016 and voted for Evan McMullen, the CIA agent, put up by Bill Crystal.
03:09:24.000Like, for example, I think that there is a threat that you will have a disaffected MAGA class who voted Trump in 2024, who right now may vote.
03:09:36.000Either sit out the midterms or dabble in pockets of Democrat sphere just over the Israel issue, for example.
03:09:45.000And that's just because of a perceived hostility on portions of the MAGA right that are pro Israel and draw a purity litmus test there.
03:09:55.000And so, like, you see this and you see it, you know, in vice versa in certain respects.
03:10:05.000I see this development with the purity tests developing that way.
03:10:09.000But at the same time, you do need to hash out these issues.
03:10:13.000You know, you will have aggrieved junior partners.
03:10:16.000Who feel that the senior partners in the coalition are getting everything they want while they're getting very little or less of what they want.
03:10:23.000And so, you know, these disputes do have to be worked out.
03:10:27.000But, you know, what often happens when they grow too large and unresolved is you have what happened to the Democrats in 2024.
03:10:51.000I know you have a lot of knowledge on American history, but these guys also have a bunch of other niche American history that I think will just kind of maybe round out some of your other experiences.
03:11:02.000Sorry, that sounded kind of condescending.
03:11:06.000It would be an interesting collab, I think, to see happen.
03:11:10.000And then also to Brett, if he's even still alive at this point, I think that Vigilance, Vigilance, Citizen Vigilante was a like, Just a comedy movie that like passed by everybody.
03:11:59.000Like, if I'm supposed to pretend that, you know, Christopher Nolan is the most evil filmmaker of all time now and Uwe Boll is the way to go, you're too deep into politics at this point.