Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...

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PART 2 ANTI-ANTI-NAZI BARBARIAN HORDES ARE KNOCKING DOWN THE GATES

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Trump WAKES UP to NIGHTMARE NEWS and PANICS
Legal AF
Oct 10, 2025 The Intersection with Michael Popok

Trump controls all 3 branches of government, yet exploits the Shutdown he caused on the Democrats, rather than help Americans and red-state voters by ensuring that Americans have dignified healthcare they can afford. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York joins Popok to brief our audience on how they can hold Trump and the MAGA accountable, and to discuss Trump's use of the Presidency to indict his enemies and line his pockets.



Transcript

Somebody take the social media button
away from Donald Trump. Pissed off that
he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize, he
decided to go attack the Chinese. and by
posting
this long multi-screen missive which
I'll have to read to you in which he
attacked the Chinese for trying to flex
their muscle and show that they alone
control the global supply chain for
technology and that they were going to
start putting massive tariffs on rare
earth minerals, you know, copper and
zinc and lead and other things that go
into magnets that are used in
semiconductor production, automotive
production, electric vehicle production.
Once they did that, Donald Trump said,
"Well, I'm not going to meet with she
then, the Chinese premier. I'm not going
to meet with him then. There's no reason
to meet with him. He's been laying in
wait." And the stock market went over
the cliff, shedding a trillion dollars
or more in one social media post. I'm
Michael Popock. You're here on Friday on
Legal AF. It's time for Trump economics
and Donald Trump having a hissy fit and
throwing America's economy into a tail
spin again. Right now that the tariff
war between China and the United States
is being won by China who is eating
Donald Trump and therefore our lunch. We
have the rates already at 57% against
Chinese goods. China has a 35% or 33%
tariff rate against us and it decided in
the next round of negotiations to
demonstrate its power, its economic
power over the American economy. And so
it announced that it will be putting uh
major control tariffs over rare earth
minerals, cobalt, copper, zinc, lead
etc.
US manufacturing especially in the tech
industry and the automotive industry
need all of those things and they also
need it for magnets which goes into
batteries and EVs and those types of
things. In fact, the US automotive
industry has said they're going to start
shutting factories if they are denied
access at a reasonable price to rare
earth minerals. China knows that. So, it
wanted to show Donald Trump what it
could do to the to the uh technology
supply chain with one decision. And
Donald Trump fired back, said, "We're
going to do high tariffs against China,
and we're back at a Chinese American
tariff war that Donald Trump told the
American people months ago was settled."
The just to show you what's happened to
the stock market, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average just today shed 700
points, almost 2% of its value. NASDAQ,
which has a lot of tech companies inside
of it, worse over over um over 2.5%.
The only companies that did well today
on the stock market are the American
companies that are in the rare earth
business because who went up 14% because
people are like, "Where do I put my
money? I better put it into rare earth
materials." Now, this fight between
Trump and she is a losing proposition
for the American people. There's an old
adage, there's an old saying, when
elephants fight, only the grass suffers.
And we got two elephants fighting here,
and we're on the wrong end of that. Um,
but this Chinese muscle flex, Donald
Trump knew how to be coming. He You
think that China and she were going to
allow the the tariffs to sit at 35% for
this long? And after the negotiations
got stuck in the mud between America and
US interest, that's when she struck. Let
me read to you from this crazy
this crazy
nutbag
posting that Donald Trump did after he
learned that he was not going to win the
Nobel Peace Prize. Obviously trying to
put his his uh his eye somewhere else.
He posted, "Some very strange things are
happening in China." exclamation mark.
They're becoming very hostile and
sending letters to countries throughout
the world that they want to impose
export controls on each and every
element of production having to do with
rare earths and virtually anything else
that they can think of. You know, Donald
Trump doesn't write these things, right?
We know they don't write these things
because Marco Rubio had a run into him
with the Israel Gaza resolution pre
being proposed to approve a social media
post. So, he doesn't actually write this
stuff. But let's continue. Nor nor are
we uh confident that he actually wanted
to post this. You know, there's
reporting that that instruction he gave
to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to
prosecute everybody and hurry up about
it. That wasn't supposed to be uh a that
was supposed to be a direct message to
her. Apparently, he's using the direct
messaging to get around presidential
records act problems. But I digress.
Let's keep going. Whoever wrote this
that he that he posted on Truth Social,
Trump says nobody has ever seen anything
like it. it would clog the markets and
make life difficult for virtually every
country in the world, especially for
China. Um, I've always felt they've been
lying and wait and now, as usual, I've
been proven right. There is no there is
no way. Um, there is no way, he says,
uh, that China is going to be able to
hold us captive. The Chinese letters
were especially inappropriate in that
that this was the day that after 3,000
years of bedumin fighting, there is
peace in the Middle East. I wonder if
the timing is coincidental. I wonder if
it's coincidental that you wrote this
thing to tank the American economy after
you lost the Nobel Prize. Um, so he says
he's going to have to do massive
increase of tariffs on Chinese products
as a countermeasure. That freaked out
traders and brokers on Wall Street. And
there goes wealth wiping out all of this
week's gains and then some on the stock
market which Donald Trump likes to point
to as the in one of the indishia of the
health of his economy. Well, his economy
sucks. American people are suffering
every day and we know it. All you got to
do is talk to people about their
pocketbook, purse, and checkbook issues
around their kitchen table. And you know
that Donald Trump uh economics are
terrible for the American people. He's
been in nine months. He took a healthy,
vibrant economy handed to him by the
Democrats and he threw it into the trash
can to reward his friends.
The consumer confidence is way down as
we go into Christmas buying season, if
you can believe it, and holiday season.
The inflation is up, manufacturing is
down, the production of goods and
services is down,
and he's cut off all of the information
lines to the Federal Reserve so they can
set an appropriate interest rate for the
to to help the economy. And now's the
time to pick a fight with China. We just
had Canada effectively work out a number
of issues with Donald Trump when Mark
Carney, their prime minister and former
central banker who knows what he's
doing, took Donald Trump to the
cleaners. And that's a compliment on on
tariff policy. So, having lost his trade
war, if you will, with Canada, Donald
Trump's like flailing around looking for
a new country to pick a fight with. I
know China, one of our major trading
partners
and who has control over a tremendous
amount of the supply chain related to
our technology that drives artificial
intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Donald Trump wants this to be an AI
cryptocurrency economy. Not without the
Chinese, it's not going to be not
without their rare earth minerals.
There's only so much rare earth minerals
that we have in the United States. See,
that's the that's the paradox of the
American economy. We make more than we
use. We make more in quality goods and
services, especially in technology than
Americans can possibly consume,
especially in America that's in a
strangle hold because of Donald Trump
and who has choked out the life of
Americans and their budgets. So, we have
to look to foreign markets
and to sell our agricultural products,
our goods, our services. But Donald
Trump is busy choking them off because
of America first and then wanting to
brag, "Oh, I brought in hundreds of
billions of dollars into the Treasury
and tariffs. You've spent a billion
dollars on your national guards invading
um blue states." So, it's let's just
call it a wash.
So now we're going to see what's going
to happen next. But this is the I think
the lesson here is you can't trust a
word that Donald Trump says when he says
he has a deal. And I think that applies
right here to the Israel Hamas conflict.
When he says he has a deal and he
celebrates it prematurely. He's very
good at premature celebration if you
know what I mean. Then then we have to
sit around and see if what the what the
reality in real life IRL
uh turns out to be. Right now the
economy looks in the trash. Federal
Reserve knows it. Donald Trump's Council
of Economic Adviserss know it and the
American people who have the pain at the
pump and the pain at the at the cash
register every day. They know it as
well. I'll continue to follow it here.
Thank you for joining Legal AF on
Friday.

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Chief Justice Roberts Gets EXPOSED in NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
Legal AF
Oct 10, 2025

On Court of History, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak with Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent, about how Chief Justice John Roberts helped build a Supreme Court that shields corruption, empowers Trump, and dismantles the Constitution. From Bush v. Gore to Trump v. United States, Graves exposes the right-wing network and billionaires behind America’s judicial takeover.



Transcript

Welcome to the Court of History.
I'm Sydney Blumenthal. I'm here with my
colleague Sean Menum, Princeton
University, subscribed to Legal AF.
We're here with Lisa Graves, the author
of a
new book on the Supreme Court and John
Roberts called Without Precedent: How
Chief Justice Roberts and his
accompllices rewrote the Constitution
and Dismantled Our Rights. Lisa was the
chief counsel for nominations on the
Senate Judiciary Committee. She was
deputy assistant attorney general. She
is the executive director of True North
Research, president of the board of the
Center for Media and Democracy. In part
one, we discussed the myth of John
Roberts as an institutionalist
and the core takeover. And we'd like to
continue that. For those uh who have not
heard part one, I urge you to
watch that. Now, we will pick up with
John Roberts leading the Supreme Court
to cover up what becomes the coup of
January 6th. First of all, what he does
to create the presidential immunity
decision.
Yes, this is, I think, perhaps the worst
decision ever issued by the Supreme
Court. Although Dreadscott still holds
that that role in history because it it
uh propelled us into the Civil War. But
this decision uh this decision in Trump
versus United States dismantles a core
component of the United States in a way
that is different than what happened in
DreadScott. What John Roberts has done
is knock down the central pillar of the
founding of America, which is basically
founded on no kings, on not having a
president be a king. And in fact, the
constitution in two places expressly
says that the job of the president of
the leader of the of the executive
branch is to faithfully execute the law
to to act faithfully toward our
constitutional laws. And what John
Roberts did was orchestrate a decision,
a partisan decision by the six
Republican appointees to the court,
including himself, that in essence
pardoned Trump that exonerated him, that
said that he could not be held liable in
criminal court for his prior actions and
that in and that he couldn't going
forward. and he sent a signal to some a
subset of the American people that Trump
did no wrong and could do no wrong and
that the prosecutions of him were
illegitimate. In fact, those
prosecutions were well grounded in law
and the Constitution, which also
describes how presidents can be
impeached for high crimes and
misdemeanors. And even Mitch McConnell,
the then Republican leader of the United
States Senate in voting against that
second impeachment, improvidently,
outrageously voting against it,
conceded, as the other Republican
Republicans who did who also voted
against it conceded that of course
Donald Trump could be tried for his
crimes surrounding January 6. But not
just that, that's not the only thing
that John Roberts did. The other thing
that he did was to move heaven and earth
to block Colorado from keeping Trump off
the ballot. In that case, the court
acted rapidly uh in order to stop uh a
decision by the Colorado Supreme Court
and lower courts that of course under
the 14th amendment, Donald Trump was
barred for engaging in insurrection, for
fermenting an insurrection. But John
Roberts worked uh to create basically a
a you know a five a pardon me a four a
five to four uh ruling that he didn't
even sign that blocked Colorado from
from keeping Trump off the ballot. And
let's go back to the signing for a
minute because
he assigned it to Justice Alo
to write
and there were two justices on the
Supreme Court who should have recused
themselves because of conflicts in of
interest involving January 6.
Yes, that's right. So there's a the
third decision involving uh people who
were charged with crimes around around
um you know people who were charged with
crimes for their actions their violence
decision.
The Fischer decision.
The Fischer decision. That's right. And
so um what what happened was there were
two justices on the Supreme Court who
were clearly conflicted who under the
federal recusal statute should have
recused themselves. And one of them was
Clarence Thomas, whose wife, there's
ample documentation of her role, her
text messages to Mark Meadows trying to
stop the recount, her actual outreach to
legislators in Wisconsin and Arizona to
try to get fake electors appointed.
There's no way Clarence Thomas should
have been near that case. But also,
there's no way Alto should have been
allowed to sit on that case after a flag
aligned with the insurrection. The
upside down American flag was was
hoisted over his home for weeks um after
January 6th. Um so both of them had
significant conflicts that any
reasonable person would believe they
would not be fair, could not hear those
cases fairly. But John Roberts let them
set on the cases. And as you point out,
Sydney, uh, in one of the cases, Roberts
had assigned Alo to write the opinion,
um, but then after the news broke about
the, um, January 6 sympathizing flag
hoisting, uh, Roberts took that
assignment away and wrote the decision
himself. So, he didn't ask Alto to
recuse or demand that Alto recuse this
supposed institutionalist defender of
the court. he let him sit on that case
and participate in the arguments and
participate in the drafting in essence
even though he knew that he had an
obvious conflict and Roberts wrote that
decision but Roberts beyond that had
orchestrated that whole ruling by taking
by taking the case up from the DC
circuit a well-reasoned well-grounded
opinion saying of course the president
doesn't have this wide immunity for
so-called official acts that's contrary
to our entire history and Robert's
moved uh you know moved everything he
could to make sure that that Donald
Trump would not face a criminal trial
before the 2024 election and that in
fact if he returned to power he would
have even more power than he had before
and more power than any president has
ever had.
You know in direct in direct direct cont
you know contradiction as you say to not
not only the spirit but the actual
letter of the constitution of the United
States.
Yeah. Yeah. So uh um we begin with um um
John Roberts working in Bush vGore to
give the presidency on a Supreme Court
decision five to four to George W. Bush
when he is which elevates him and then
he as chief justice
uh is an expert at delaying the process
when he wants to on the January 6 case
and expediting it when he wants to to
make sure that Trump is on the ballot
and acts in a transparently partisan way
and also does not force the recusal of
two justices who are clearly conflicted
now.
Yeah. And and when you look at it from
that perspective, what you see is John
Robert's devotion not just to not to the
presidency because we saw how he behaved
when Biden was president and worked in
all sorts of ways to block signature
initiatives of Joe Biden and uh before
him Barack Obama uh in terms of the
clean power plan for example. But when
there's a Republican president, there's
no impediment that he John Roberts works
to aid Republican presidents um Bush and
Trump and in this case has done so in a
way that basically made him made John
Roberts the kingmaker for Donald Trump.
Yeah. So um uh the Supreme Court under
Roberts um over the last few months has
used the sha what's called the shadow
docket to issue I hesitate to call them
decisions but rulings that provide no
decisions no reasoning no opinions that
allow uh fedical please on the part of
Trump to operate u on the basis of his
illegitimate and illegal emergency
declarations. Um and now the court is
back and so um and we are also facing a
crisis over voting rights. Trump has
talked about uh invoking the
insurrection act. Um Governor JB
Pritsker of Illinois has said he wants
to use it to intimidate voters leading
into the 2026 election and possibly use
it to seize ballot boxes. Uh and we have
a voting rights case coming up um
involving uh the uh the house. Uh it
comes from Louisiana. What can we expect
from John Roberts here?
I don't think we can expect John Roberts
to be anything other than the partisan
that he has been. Uh I don't think that
he will uh do anything to stand up to
Trump in any significant way. And in
fact, what we've seen this year, as you
point out, Sydney, is decision edict, I
would say, edict after edict by this
court overturning well-reasoned
uh decisions by lower court judges that
Trump's actions have violated the law,
that the facts prove it, that that the
Trump administration is behaving
contrary to the Constitution, to
statutes, to regulations, to contracts,
and to long-standing legal precedents.
But but what Roberts and his fellow
partisan Republicans on the Supreme
Court have done is wave those laws away
without even giving the reasoning for
doing so. And now we're going to see
them spool out the purported reasoning,
the pretext for allowing Trump these
extraordinary powers. There may be one
or two times where they they stop Trump.
I doubt it. I think what's going to
happen this term is is we're going to
see in full bloom that the mask is off.
The mask has fallen from this court and
it is going to be doing everything it
can to try to rationalize whatever
Donald Trump wants.
Yeah. Um Sean and Lisa, could you both
reflect on the postconstitutional moment
we're in? Have we ever been here before
and how do we navigate it? Sean,
no. I mean, Lisa made a very good point
in saying that in many ways Trump vy US
was an even more um what should we say
dramatically um um
unpatriotic unconstitutional violation
than even the DreadScott decision. I
mean the DreadScott decision um had over
saying that blacks were not citizens. It
did a lot of different things but this
has actually completely undone the
American Revolution as far as I can see.
I mean the American Revolution was
fought in part for independence but also
to overthrow a unmarkable order that was
in power in the United in what was going
to become the United States. The United
States was rejecting the United States
was going to be a republic. Trump v uh
US basically that decision came as close
as you can to undoing that revolution
and when people say no kings and so
forth I mean it's a slogan that has but
the fact is that that is exactly what
that decision did. So, you know, we're
not talking now about, you know,
DreadScott may no longer be the um the
measure for how bad a Supreme Court can
be, how how much in violation of the US
Constitution that a Supreme Court can
run. And that's my view of it.
I I I agree. I agree with you, Sean. And
and also, you know, when you think of
the people that Trump has surrounded
himself with in the second
administration, it includes people like
Russell VA who are talking about a
postconstitutional
regime.
And that's saying out saying the quiet
part out loud. Lisa Graves, thank you
very much uh for appearing on the Court
of History. Lisa is the author of
Without Precedent, an essential book to
understand the moment that we're in and
the role of the Supreme Court and
particularly John Roberts. On behalf of
uh Sean Walens of Princeton and myself,
the court is adjourned and don't forget
to subscribe to Legal AF.

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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist. The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’. Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon
by Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr in San Francisco and Nick Robins-Early
theguardian.com
Fri 10 Oct 2025 11.24 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... antichrist

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Over the past month, Peter Thiel has hosted a series of lectures philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.

Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming.

Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.

“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”

Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.

“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.

The meandering gospel of Peter

Thiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.

Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.

Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attender who gave them on the condition of anonymity.

When reached for comment, Thiel’s spokesperson, Jeremiah Hall, did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist.

The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”

The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.

“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.

His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.

On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”.

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People protesting outside a Peter Thiel event in San Francisco. Photograph: Dara Kerr/The Guardian

A trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”

What do Thiel’s lectures say?

The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors.

He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.

What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.

Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen?

Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.

There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?

Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.

Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.

Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:

They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.

When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’

During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:

I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.

Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?

Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.

A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.

Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.

My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.

It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.

During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.

Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.

Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.

In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.

Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.

One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:

He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.

I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.

Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist:

The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.

However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”.

I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills.

Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation:

If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people …

This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’

And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’

And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’

When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:

I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?

Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.

Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:

Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.

Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.

By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:

Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.

He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.

Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.

In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:

One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.

What does he say about Trump and politics?

Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.

At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.

One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.

I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.

I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:

In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.

Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.

There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.

In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, antisemitic theologians who suggested that the antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov.

Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:

Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.

Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.

Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.

At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:

By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.

During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate:

I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes.

In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.

Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.

“The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.

Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor.

​​I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, … someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last precedent where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky.

And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.

But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different.

Why is he fixated on stagnation?

Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.

The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says.

During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.

If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.

The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.

In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:

This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.

In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal:

I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad.

References to pop culture and literature

Thiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here:

The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.

In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”.

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

Do Thiel’s arguments make sense?

In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be:

There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power?

[admin]

Netanyahu inches toward Gaza deal under pressure from Trump
by Marc Caputo, Barak Ravid
Axios
Updated 2 hours ago -
https://archive.is/a3Gye#selection-353.0-891.27

[x]
Trump and Netanyahu in the Oval Office in February. Photo: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty

The U.S. and Israel are inching toward an agreement on President Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza, which Trump hopes will be announced after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, White House officials say.

Why it matters: The meeting could come down to a binary choice for Netanyahu: accept Trump's plan or risk a public rift with a president who appears willing to break with him over Gaza for the first time since returning to office.

• Trump told Axios on Sunday that his Gaza plan is in its "final stages" and that Netanyahu is on board. But the Israeli prime minister's public statements have been far more ambiguous.
• Still, Israeli officials tell Axios the gaps between the U.S. and Israel narrowed significantly during a lengthy meeting on Sunday between Netanyahu, White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. They think a White House announcement is likely on Monday.
• U.S. and Israeli officials tell Axios we could see an announcement from Trump and Netanyahu on Monday. Hamas would still need to endorse the deal.

Driving the news: Monday's meeting at the White House will include lunch and press conference.

• A Trump adviser involved in the plans said the view in the White House is that if Netanyahu doesn't take the deal, he'll be to blame for continuing the war, "enabling Hamas and doing nothing for the Palestinians who have so many humanitarian needs. People will continue to starve. Let's hope we get there."
• "The Arabs have agreed to it like 100%. Now we're waiting for the president to work his magic on Netanyahu," the adviser said.

Friction point: Trump has never publicly blamed Netanyahu for prolonging the war with Hamas or failing to deliver a deal to free the remaining hostages.

• But if Netanyahu says no this time, some of Trump's aides think he might turn on the prime minister. Support for Israel and the war in Gaza has sunk to new lows, including at the White House and MAGA world more broadly.
• "Everyone — and I mean everyone — is exasperated with Bibi," said one administration official familiar with the peace talks.
• Some of Trump's advisers have told him the Gaza peace process is a test for his global credibility. Everything Trump wants to accomplish in the Middle East will be undermined until he can convince Netanyahu to end the war, one adviser said.

State of play: Witkoff and Kushner met Netanyahu in New York for several hours on Sunday to try to bridge the remaining differences over Trump's 21-point peace plan.

• Both Witkoff and Kushner have "just about had it" with Netanyahu, the Trump adviser claimed: "Steve was handling Israel more and Jared was with the Arab states. But both are at their wits' end with Israel."

Zoom in: The most recent peace initiative was paradoxically born out of Israel's failed attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders with a highly controversial missile strike in Qatar.

• "When Bibi sent those missiles into Qatar, he united the Gulf state Arabs," Trump's adviser said. "They are all one. They speak with one voice. ... It was a rallying effect. And on this, for the first time, you really had a monolithic Arab world. And Witkoff and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said: 'Aha, this is the time.' And that's what's happening."

Zoom out: Frustration, irritation and confusion with Netanyahu has mounted for months in Trump's orbit, both inside and outside the White House.

• Some Trump advisers told the president that Netanyahu was "manhandling" him, one of those advisers told Axios. Others believe Netanyahu has been making massively destabilizing decisions, like the Qatar strike, mainly to help his own political survival.
• "He is obviously very worried about his trial," a senior White House official said, adding that's probably why Netanyahu is being so aggressive. The official characterized it as "invading and bombing every country on the map."
• U.S. and Israeli officials believe Netanyahu will now have to choose between Trump's desire to end the war and the ultranationalist coalition partners who are pressing him to fight on, and with whom he has repeatedly sided up to now.

One factor in the Trump-world frustrations with Netanyahu is his tendency to wade into domestic U.S. politics.

• On Friday at the UN, Netanyahu met with friendly U.S. social media influencers, most of whom are conservative Trump supporters, to ask for their help to "fight" online for Israel.
• "We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefield, and the most important ones are on social media," Netanyahu said, singling out X and TikTok.
• In the meeting, Netanyahu also attacked what he called "the woke right — or the woke Reich" and said "they are insane, they are lunatics." He's clashed in particular with Tucker Carlson, who has become increasingly critical of Israel.
• Carlson claimed over the weekend on his show that Netanyahu "is going around telling people: 'I control Donald Trump.'" Netanyahu denied that in an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

What they're saying: In interviews this month with Axios, Trump advisers expressed bewilderment at Netanyahu's "bizarre obsession" with online political discourse in the U.S.

• "We can't figure out what the guy is up to. Focus on Israel. Focus on Gaza. Stop getting involved in U.S. domestic political issues," a White House official said. "Stop talking about Tucker. Stop getting influencers here to be your propaganda. It's not helping you. It's not helping Israel. And it damn sure isn't helping us get a peace deal."

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

Ex-CIA Spy Reveals Mossad's DARKEST Secrets, Israel CRUMBLING | John Kiriakou JOINS
Danny Haiphong
Started streaming 41 minutes ago #israel #mossad #trump

As the world holds its breath on a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou joins the show to discuss the terrifying secrets of the Mossad and its relationship to US foreign policy, the CIA, Trump, and much more. Also joining the show are Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria and Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka!

-- THE TORTURE PAPERS: THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB, Edited by Karen J. Greenberg, Joshua L. Dratel, Introduction by Anthony Lewis

Transcript

Welcome everyone. Welcome back to the show. It's your host Danny Hiong. Hit the like button as you come on. That
helps boost the stream in YouTube's algorithm. As you can see, I am joined by two very special guests. We have John
Keryaku, first time on the show. He is a former CIA officer, head of the counterterrorism division in Pakistan
and CIA whistleblower on the torture program. John, good to see you. Good to see you, Danny.
Great. Great to have you on. And we have Joe Lauria. is the chief editor of Consortium News which everyone should be
reading and following. Joe, great to be with you. Thank you, Danny. Yes. Now, let's start with you, John.
So, I wanted to actually ask you, you know, I pulled the audience. 90% of them said that Mossad, they believe Mossad
controls US foreign policy. There's been a lot of anger about uh issues, for
example, like Charlie Kirk's murder. Many people uh believe or have
suspicions that Israel had a hand in it. Perhaps early intelligence had a hand in it. We have the Epstein situation which
has had a huge impact on both US domestic and foreign politics visav
Donald Trump and possible Israeli involvement. And then we just have an overall situation uh where the US is
consistently following the Israeli line and what it does around the world. Could you talk about your experience first
with whistleblowing on the CIA and what that possibly could tell us about how the quote unquote deep state which
involves MOSAD really uh exercises its influence on US foreign policy?
Sure. I I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in December of 2007. I
said that I said in an interview with ABC News that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US
government policy, and that the policy had been personally approved by President Bush. And uh you know, at
first the CIA asked the Justice Department to uh investigate me with an
eye toward charging me with a with a serious crime. After one year though, the FBI
determined that I had not committed a crime and there were no charges. Barack Obama became president a month later. He
named John Brennan as the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and Brennan asked the
Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. I was investigated for another three years. And then in
January of 2012, I was arrested by the FBI, charged with five felonies,
including three counts of espionage. And um and I waited it out. I hadn't committed espionage. They knew I hadn't
committed espionage. And those charges ended up being dismissed, or not dismissed, but dropped. Um, but I ended
up taking a plea to a lesser uh charge to violating the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act of 1982 and uh served 23 months in a federal
prison. Something that I would do again today if I needed to. I'm unrepentant.
Somebody had to stop the torture program. Somebody had to reveal to the
American people that it was happening. Um, I wish somebody else had done it,
but I did it. And so there it is, and I would do it again. Now, to this even more important issue of Israeli
involvement in or even Israeli control of American foreign policy. It has long been my position that the United States
has never had an America first policy, foreign policy. It's always been a
foreign policy that put Israel first oftentimes at the expense of American
national interests. I saw this at the CIA every single day. Uh and I've seen
it since I left the CIA when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff as the senior investigator. We
were never permitted to do anything that might anger the Israelis. We always had to think about the Israelis first and
about the United States second. Something that I I long resented. And then I'll tell you something even more
recent. This happened a week ago. Um I I have a Google alert on myself and
uh my name came up in some obscure publication that I had never heard of
before called the the Middle East forum. It's clearly an Israeli publication. And
there was an article there last week written by the political adviser to the Israeli foreign minister. And he said in
this piece that I have repeatedly criticized Mossad. I have repeatedly
criticized Israeli actions in Gaza. I have repeatedly called Israeli actions a
genocide. And so he said, "I was um
vehemently anti-semitic." Number one, those were his words. John Kiryaku is
vehemently anti-semitic. Uh, number two,
he said that what I've written about Israel in
publications like Consortium News, for example, shows the rot currently taking
place among left-wing intellectuals in the United States and that it is up to
Israel to stop us, to stop us before we damage Israel. The the comments on this
obscure article were absolutely ferocious. Many of them had to have been from bots
because the way the way the comments ended was, yeah, it started with, "Yes,
he's he's anti-Semitic. Yes, he hates all Jews. He wants death to death to the Jews. He wants to he's pro- Hamas." And
then they ended up with that I'm morbidly obese, ugly, and stupid on top
of it all. But this to me, I got to chuckle out of it, of course, but but it's dangerous
for a couple of of reasons. Number one,
it shows how closely the Israelis are watching all of us. They're not watching
Fox and CNN and MSNBC to make sure everybody toes the line. They're coming
all the way down to Consortium News and to John Kuryaku. And God forbid any of
us should criticize obvious clear Israeli war crimes and crimes
against humanity in Gaza. Another thing that I have criticized the Israelis for over the years is the the
long arm of Apac on Capitol Hill. I
would like to know, and this is a serious question, why Apac does not have to register as a foreign agent when
everybody else does. If you are doing any work at all on
behalf of a foreign government, you must register under FAR, the Foreign Agents
Registration Act. You just go to far.gov. It takes five minutes to fill out the form.
So why does everybody have to do it except the Israelis?
Yeah. And uh before I get to you, Joe, uh first uh John, you said that you saw
it in the CIA. Could you say something about what you saw exactly that uh made
you believe that the had influence? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Forgive me if I'm repeating
myself here. I've told this story many times, but the very first briefing that I ever gave as a brand new junior CIA
analyst was to the Washington DC representatives of Mossad and Shinbet.
And I had been on I had been on the job I'm going to say six weeks, seven weeks
and I was told you're going to do your first foreign liaison briefing. You're an overt employee so you use your real
name. So I went with a big group of colleagues and the we don't meet with
the Israelis in CIA headquarters. We meet with almost everybody else in CIA headquarters. But the Israelis would so
frequently bring gifts with listening devices embedded in
them to to bug our conference rooms and our offices. We told them, "Look, you can't do this anymore. So, you're not
allowed on on the compound anymore. And so, we have to meet with the Israelis at an off-site facility.
Number one. Number two, I go to this briefing and because we're all overt,
we're using our real names. And so, the the lead Iraq analyst gives her briefing, then the political analyst,
then the military analyst, then the economic analyst, then the oil analyst. Finally comes to me. And like I say, six
weeks on the job, 25 years old. I guess I was 24, 25 years
old. And I said, "My name is John Kiryaku and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein's state of mind." And
the Shinbet officer looks at me over his glasses and he says, "Spell your name." So I spelled
it and he says, "You are Jewish.
It enraged me the question and I said, "I am not recruitable. Don't even think
that you can recruit me." And so he just took notes on everything
I said. I went back to the office and my boss said, "How was the briefing?" I said, "That shinbet bastard tried to
recruit me in front of everybody." And he laughed and he said, "They do that to
all of us." Now the at the CIA were not permitted to spy on the Israelis. They are absolutely positively forbidden,
right? Hands off. But they spy on us all the time. In in my very first week at
the CIA, uh we had a series of briefings. You know, all the new hires are sitting in
the CIA auditorium and HR comes and the insurance lady comes and this guy comes
and that guy comes. We had the head of security for the whole CIA and he was talking about um
counter inelligence. For example, there's a restaurant down the street from Langley. Don't ever go there. Why?
Because the KGB thinks that we all go there. So, at any given time, on any given day, the restaurant is jam-packed
full of KGB officers. So, we just don't go there. But another thing that he said
was to take Israel as an example. He said, "At the Israeli embassy in Washington, there's one Shinbet officer
and one Mossad officer, but the FBI, and
this this is 35year-old information, the FBI had been able to identify
187 undeclared Mossad agents at work in the United
States, all trying to infiltrate our defense contractors and steal our defense secrets.
So, if we know that and if the FBI has been able to identify 187 of them, why
haven't we made 187 felony arrests on charges of espionage?
Why do we let them push us around like this? But we do. It's a political decision
that's been made at the White House and it was made many, many years ago.
Yeah. Well, uh, Joe, I definitely want your comments, uh, on this in particular. I'll I'll put it up. You
know, John was talking about Apac. Um, and they have a new ad that's come out,
and I just want to pull it up and play it because there is a huge rebranding right now of Apac to make it seem like
it is an American organization. Here is the ad. Let's talk about Apac today. Apac
on Capitol Hill. Apac. AAC. AACA. APAC.
You may have heard our name, but how much do you really know about APAC? Apac is an American organization that works
to strengthen the USIsrael relationship. This partnership advances America's interests and democratic values and
helps keep Israel safe. Our 5 million members are US citizens, Democrats and
Republicans from every part of the country, who urge our elected leaders to enact pro-Israel policies. This includes
expanding America's defense partnership with Israel, supporting life-saving security assistance, confronting Iran
and its terror proxies, and promoting peace and normalization. Being pro-
Israel is good policy, and Apac members make sure it's good politics, too. We raise money to help elect pro-Israel
candidates for Congress from both parties. And we take the political fight to our opponents, helping defeat
anti-Israel candidates running for the House or Senate. Apac is leading the fight in Washington to secure the future
of the USIsrael relationship. The actions of pro-Israel Americans today will help determine the future of this
bond and the fate of both countries. So maybe we can commend them for their
honesty, Joe, but um perhaps you could talk about, you know, um a lot of audience members uh uh often reference
the deep state. I even see in the comments already a lot of talk about all these examples of Israeli meddling in US
affairs, even foreign policy like the USS Liberty. What has Consortium News found about this relationship that
people should know about uh that might not be spoken about even in ads like this?
Well, I I have to warn everyone this is going to be a little more left-wing rot as John.
In fact, John, I would love you to send me a link to that because I think we need to report about this in particular if they mention consortium news, but
that that's very chilling. It's up to Israel to stop the rot of the US left.
We'll let them try today. So, consortium, they got one thing right in that very funny ad and thank you for
giving me a little bit of uh cheer in this uh gloomy morning here on the east coast of the US. They got one thing
right. The Republicans and the Democrats are both on board there. Consortium News. Uh, thank you for asking for
inviting me on. Uh, Danny, is u one of the oldest, if not the oldest
independent online website in the United States. It's, uh, began in November of
1995. So, if you do the math, this is our 30th anniversary of un uninterrupted
publication. We went online actually 5 days before salon.com and months before the New York Times,
the LA Times, the Washington Post. It was around that time, 1995, that major newspapers were beginning their web
sites. And we were early on the ground there. And then why did that happen? Because Robert Perry, who was the
founder of Consortium News, wasn't a a real investigative reporter for Associated Press. And I mean by real is
that lots of people like to call themselves that. Uh but a investigative reporter in that the real sense is
someone who spends months on a story. By the way, major news organizations don't invest that kind of money or time
anymore in that kind of work, but they did back then 30 years ago. And Bob worked on enormously consequential
stories. The most important of which was on the Iran Contra scandal. Of course,
the Iran Contra scandal began when Congress cut off funding to the Contras in Nicaragua, which were trying to was a
counterrevolution against the Sandinistas, who had overthrown the Samosa family dictatorship, a family
that owned like 90% of the land in Nicaragua. Uh, and the US was dedicated, the Reagan administration, to
overturning the Sandinistas and putting the uh Samosa family back in power. But
they happened to kill these Contra, some American nuns. That didn't sit well in middle America. So the Congress had to
cut off the funding to them. And what did the Reagan White House do? Well, they decided through Israel uh to sell
arms to Iran. And this is after the 1979 revolution in Iran. This is when Iran was calling the US to great Satan. But
the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and got used the proceeds to secretly fund the contrast. Well, Bob
Perry with his partner uh uh worked on this story for months and discovered a
man named Oliver North was working in the basement of the White House running this entire illegal and unconstitutional
operation given of course that only Congress can uh appropriate money and they had shut it off. So the White House
has no business and no legal right to start sending money to a contra force in
Nicaragua. The story was solid. They had like 20 sources, documents, and the
editors at AP wouldn't run it. They kept saying, "Go back there, get some more. Can't you get Oliver North to uh confess
what happened was in the end the Spanish wire service of AP made a mistake. They
actually translated this story and published it. So once it got out to Latin America, you know, the American
the English version had to be published. That's how we learned about Oliver North." So Bob saw right up there a very
important uh example of mainstream media editors trying to suppress a very
important story that makes us look very bad and particular the that particular
administration at that time. He worked on other stories. He found out a lot about cocaine coming into the United
States from the Contras uh with weapons going in that direction and cocaine
going back on the plane. This was a story that eventually is picked up by uh Gary Webb years later and Gary worked uh
talked with Bob about that and of course Gary Webb uh was ruined because he actually revealed that those what
happened to these drugs when they gone into the inner cities of the United States. Uh Bob did a story on a CIA
manual that was found I believe after a plane one of these planes crashed in Nicaragua. He got his hands on the
manual and they explained what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua at that time. So
these are important stories, but he got fed up um because they kept trying to stop him from publishing these stories.
He went to Newsweek, same thing happened there. They told him, "You can't publish that story. It's not it's not good for
the country." This is what his editors told. It was not good for the rulers of the country, which is of course what
Newsweek editors and all the mainstream editors serve. They're serving the rulers of the country, not the reading
public. But somehow they promulgate that point of view and make it seem like everyone's point of view. It's the
American point of view, not just a small number of people at top whose interests are being served. So Bob quit Newsweek.
He went to PBS Frontline and did a a couple of documentaries. One of them on the October surprise was another one of
his big stories which showed of course that the uh Reagan uh administration
before while they were just candidates candidate the campaign of Reagan went and did a deal with Iran to withhold the
release of the American hostages from uh from Iran from the embassy that were
taken in order to get Reagan to win the election saying they'd get a better deal. So Bob did some really important
stories and it was in 1995 that he quit Newsweek and his son introduced him to the internet and that's when it went
online and uh after that many important stories were done particularly on the invasion of Iraq 2003 showing that there
wasn't WMD that's when the veterans intelligence professionals for sanity of which John is a member uh Ray McGovern
uh worked and publishes their exclusive memos with consortium news and also uh
they were all important work that Bob did on Ukraine. From beginning he
explained there was a coup in in Kiev and explained that the neo-Nazis were a
real significant problem in Ukraine even if they didn't get me elected to parliament. there an extra parliamentary
force and he also did a lot of work on the MH17 flight that was downed and then on
Russia gate he really forged ahead and was the first to really expose Russia gate as the the fraud that it was and
more importantly the dangerous aspect of the intelligence services even the
foreign one the CIA and the FBI meddling in US domestic politics as bad as Donald
Trump is and was this is something very very serious and Bob exposed it as that
and uh Aaron Mate has gone on to be probably the best reporter on that story has acknowledged uh and the debt that he
gave to Bob Perry. It wasn't just Bob there. I wrote articles on Russia gate at that time. I joined Consortium News
in 2012 because I had the same problems. And this is why he started consortium
news because he found other journalists. He created a consortium of other mainstream journals whose editors were
also suppressing their stories. And this is what happened to me. I was working at the Wall Street Journal in 2012 as their
UN correspondent. I was 25 years at the UN. I I covered the UN for the Boston Globe, for the Montreal Gazette, for the
Johannesburg Star and a bunch of other newspapers. And at the journal I was doing stories on Palestine becoming an
observer state and I was saying 140 something countries recognized Palestine as a state. This has become a big issue
now. They kept cutting that out of the story. So I I sent my article to Bob
Perry who he didn't know me from a hole in the wall and he published it. That's how I began my relationship with Bob and
when he died uh prematurely in 2018 I was named the editor.
Yeah. Well great. Thanks for telling uh your story uh Joe. Now uh I wanted to
ask about you know a lot of the most almost like terrifying secrets that uh
Israeli intel, US intel um keep now seem to be coming mainstreamed. And what I
mean by that is uh I don't know if you saw this John, there's now a concerted campaign uh by uh the Israelis by um a
contractor, a lobbying firm that has been hired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs according to FAR documents that
shows that there's a psychological operation of foot against the American evangelical community where churches
will be geoenced and people targeted subjected to pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian advertisements. And
they plan to use high-profile Christians like Stefon Curry. Um, and it will take place in western states, California,
Arizona, Colorado, Texas. Um, where they will table at college campuses. But look at all the churches that they are going
to be targeting. I mean, it's just a massive list where they are going to be going. I mean, this these lists go on
and on and on and on and on and on. Uh so John, your reaction to uh how what
role does intelligence play in some of these larger even more public examples
of uh public operations campaigns? I mean I know you've also talked about kind of the shadowy world of contracting
too. So uh please anything you want to impart on this? Oh, sorry you're muted. Here you go.
Oh, thanks. Yeah, contracting is is one thing that's kind of easy to to point at
and say, you know, look what the likes of Blackwater are doing, for example, on
behalf of Israel. But but this other stuff, this advertising and geoencing churches, this is very, very dangerous
and it's new and it's very sophisticated. Um, just in the past week, Brad Parcal, the uh the the former
Trump campaign manager, took $6 million from the Israeli government to uh begin
bombarding young people. And when I say young people, I mean like from the ages of 15 to 25 with um pro-Israel messages
on social media, for example. So if you're on Instagram, you're between the ages of 15 and 25, all of a sudden
you're going to be hit with these pro-Israel messages. uh this geoffencing churches. This is
very important for the Israelis because some of their most viciferous support
comes from evangelical Christians in the United States. In my view, deeply
misguided Christians, um misguided Christians who don't give a
wit about what's happening to Palestinian Christians, for example. And
so the Israelis aren't stupid. They see that their support is splitting or I'm sorry is sinking in the United States.
They saw the same polls that we saw last week showing that um in October of 2023,
Americans supported Israel by 46 percentage points over Palestinians. And today they support Palestinians by one
percentage point over Israelis. They see that it's slipping away from them. And so what they're doing now is twofold.
It's to shore up their support among evangelical Christians in the United
States and it is to win new supporters among young people active on social
media. Now, the Palestinians don't have the money for that kind of thing. The Palestinians don't even have money for a
lobbyist in Washington, let alone the the tens of millions of dollars or more
that Apac has and is willing to spend on things like this or on American
elections. Yeah. And Joe, I wanted to to ask you
about, you know, the when it comes to this new lobbying firm that's going to
be I mean, there's going to be mobile trailers outside of these churches, which many suspect are going to actually
be tapping into people's cell phones uh in order to gather and collect data and information on evangelical churchgoers.
And of course, we had Charlie Kirk who was killed. Um, and many suspect now
that there could be Israeli involvement if it wasn't for Netanyahu's constant
rejecting of uh all of the claims that this is going on. Um so maybe you could
quickly comment on this and and related to you know you have the highest
officials in the US government like um uh uh the vice president of the United
States who he has a deep relationship to Palunteer which is deeply connected to
the Israeli defense forces. I mean the connections go on and on. Any comment analysis you want to make on on this?
Look it's very clear. I I thought when this ceasefire came out, I wrote a piece
last Monday saying that uh there would be a hostage or prisoner exchange uh but
that it would not go on to the ceasefire after that. It would the war would resume because we've got in power in
Israel right now uh absolute extremists who used to be on the fringes of Israeli society. There used to be a mainstream
in Israel that looked at these people, the economists, as being complete lunatics. Well, the lunatics are in
power right now. And what they've taken up is the mantle of Bengurian and the other founding fathers of Israel, the
dream of a greater Israel going all the way back to the beginning of the Zionist movement. And this is uh you could read
it in Ben Benorian's diaries. It's not something uh being made up here. The idea was to take all of historic
Palestine for Israel. And what we've seen since 1948 when 750,000 people were
ethnically cleansed has been a peacemeal uh impos implementation of this greater
Israel plan. 673. So more land obviously was taken occupied territories which they still
occupy right now increasing the settlements. It's been bit by bit taking over all of greater Israel. Now they've
got this opportunity and you've got the lunatics in charge who I don't they want to give up this chance to finish the job
as Donald Trump calls it of ethnically cleansing and committing genocide to
exterminate or basically expel all of the Palestinians from Gaza and take it over completely. So I think that this
plan is only being interrupted right now for the short term. Why did they go
along with it? I think Israel is clearly losing the PR war, which is to get to your question and to that Apac ad which
is hilarious that you began this show with and now this geo fencing idea. I mean they are so desperate to they are
losing the American youth uh to Israel because of what they're doing on the
battlefield, what they're doing in Palestine. It can no longer be denied. It took two years for the majority of
the world to recognize what's happening. Many of us, including at Consortium News, wrote in November of 2023, we
started calling it a genocide. I waited a month before I used that word and I don't care anymore. Um, because that's
what it was. And now the majority of the world sees that Israel is in big trouble
with the PR. You see what's happening with Ellison buying Tik Tok
about Netanyahu. when he was at the UN in New York, he gave a meeting at the consulate on Second Avenue, the Israeli
consulate in which he said TikTok is the most important weapon right now. So, it has to be taken over and that was just
before the deal went through. This is essential. Now, I I still think this
ceasefire will collapse because I don't see Hamas surrendering and that's what uh Israel is going to demand is
demanding. I don't see the pressure of the Arab nations being involved in this
deal being other than them trying to get a piece of the action of Donald Trump's
Gaza Riviera. And I I don't trust the Arabs for a second to help the Palestinians, nor should Hamas. So I I
don't see Hamas giving up uh their weapons, surrendering. Uh I don't see any kind of arrangement of an Arab
technocratic government, particularly with Tony Blair and Donald Trump in charge of it. I mean, it's just
extraordinary even that they propose that. I think this war will resume at some point. But if it does go on a bit,
it's because Israel realized they've losing the PR war and they need to regroup. They're exhausted and maybe to
prepare for a new assault on Gaza or perhaps another major attack on Iran. So, this could last weeks as it did in
January, but it will collapse ultimately. But the public relations war is key to this. And this this this story
this this is complete fantasy to me. The idea of uh once you enter a church, they know where you are. This geo fencing as
John was explaining it. Um it's just unbelievable uh technology being employed rather than
just stopping the genocide and behaving like a proper nation. They want to continue to kill, but they want to try
to fool the young people. I don't think it's going to work. I really don't because we've got leftwing rot magazines
like Conservative News out there that are continue to publish what we say what we say about this genocide and that has
got uh resonance throughout the nation. People who are finally have woken up to what Israel is doing. I don't think any
kind of geoencing is going to keep the truth out. you know, John, as a as a former uh
intelligence officer, um and and one that is whistleblown in particular, I'm
curious on your thoughts about, you know, Joe brought up Oracle, you know, who brought up Larry Ellison buying Tik
Tok. You have Palunteer, which is JD Vance, as I said before, that's who
funded him to a tune of $15 million for his campaign. And and you know who who co-founded
Palunteer? uh the CIA with a 15 the very first uh uh
investment. It came from InQel, the CIA's venture capital arm.
Well, yeah. Talk about the, you know, talk about the role then of Intel, both Israeli and CIA and all of this. How
does it shape uh what's going on? You know, you have corporations like Palanteer, huge monopolies. they have
major contracts and they are employing their technology in Gaza and you know
with whatever else Israel is doing in the United States. So talk about this role what is actually going on and and
it's very shadowy. Not many people really understand it. How do you see it?
Yeah, it is it is shadowy. You know, the development of technology happens so
quickly and so secretly that it's generally years before we realize what
you know five years ago's uh technology was. We're we're using technology today that it's it's already
uh outdated and overtaken by events. So
the the technology that the CIA is developing, the technology that Mousad is developing in partnership with
companies like Palunteer or Oracle um is meant to
well, I'm just going to say strip us of whatever civil liberties we we have
left. And then when you when you add into that, and I'll use Larry Ellison as
the most obvious example, um his foray into
the media, his son is the president of what is it CBS or Paramount? I think
it's Paramount, whatever it is. His his son is um is a media mogul uh in his own
right. You have to ask, do we do we have any
mainstream media in this in this country that really is independent and that can
give us an an unbiased view? I think the answer is no. Uh Joe talked about the
founding of consortium news. I'm proud to be associated with consortium news
because I can write what I know to be the truth and I'm never censored. You
can't say that about ABC, CBSNBC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC,
about any of them. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Journal, the LA Times, they're all compromised. And it's
only getting worse as we further incorporate these new technologies into
our daily lives. Geocaching churches, no less.
I mean, what what's next? How bad does this get before Americans finally say enough? Because they're not saying it
yet. Yeah. And and Joe, uh you you know your
impressions on this on the kind of technologies that are being employed, the uh how these uh big contractors are
influencing uh not just US foreign policy but also how Israel is able to
influence US foreign policy. Well, this is the key question and John um at the
beginning when he talked about this article that he read where they said Israel will stop stop us on the left
from saying these things about Israel. This is an open admission of what is clear. Uh it's in a sense Israel has
activated their cells. They have cells around the world that will stop free
speech. And the biggest example was of course on the college campuses in the United States very early on the
demonstrations against what Israel was doing when it became clear to a lot of young people that a genocide was being
perpetrated in Israel. talking about again around November, December 2023, almost two years ago. And what happened?
The police were activated to stop those. And this is the Biden administration, by the way. And then all the the university
presidents dragged in to Congress to embarrass themselves and to be shut up.
And who's behind all of this stuff? You you got to see Israel's hand in this. For example, at Columbia University, the
uh the at New York Police Department, there was a woman in charge of running
the suppression of those demonstrations. She was a former IDF officer. The Greyzone reported on that. We look at
Richard Med in Britain too. It's not just the United States. We look at this terrorism act of 2000 in and in in the
UK and people like Richard Medhurst, like uh Craig Murray who's on our board,
like John Keryaka is at Consortium News, they are arrested and George Galloway, I
just happened to to George and his wife, they are stopped at the borders when entering the UK and questioned because
of articles or statements they've made on social media or on TV about uh what Israel is doing. and they are being uh
threatened with being charged under the terrorism act which is just simply giving support to what they call support
to a terrorist organization which means if you criticize Israel they see that as being support for Hamas which of course
is a non-sear that's not absolutely uh connected at all you can criticize Israel and Hamas if you want it doesn't
mean if you you cannot say anything against Israel without worrying about now being arrested for speech or being
stopped from protesting or stopped from publishing the executive order that Trump put out about callant for example
a terrorist organization anybody who's getting very much like the British uh terrorism act so that Palestine action
for example was prescribed a couple of months ago by Yevette Cooper the home secretary as being a terrorist organization why because they went
inside uh an RAF base and splash some red paint on an on RAF plane that was
working to fly surveillance missions over Gaza to help the Israelis with their genocide. This is a form of
protest. We saw the plow shares did that in the US years ago. It's vandalism at the worst. It is
certainly not terrorism. To call Palestine Action terrorist organization was outrageous. And therefore, anybody
who says they support Palestine Action is being arrested. And it's become a ritual now. Every Sunday and all over
Britain, we have people in wheelchairs and blind people and uh and elderly people and all kinds of people who carry
a post saying, "I support Palestine Action." The police come and they arrest them. It's absurd. But who's behind
this? Now, Richie Medhurst, I mentioned him. I want to just say that he found emails where the Israeli uh the Israeli
uh sorry embassy in London was in communication with the Home Office about
his case. And the same thing with Palestine Action. It came out in the in in a court hearing about Palestine
Action uh that the Israeli embassy was involved again in pressuring the British
government to designate them as a terrorist organization. That's why I say they're like cells. They're like
terrorist cells. This is Israel has their cells which they activate around the world to put a stop to criticism of
Israel. This is the main battlefront more. But they don't want to defeat Hamas, by the way, right away because if
they defeat Hamas, then the war ends. That's what they say it's all about. Of course, the war is not about Hamas. It's
about the genocide and the ethnic cleansing and the takeover completely of Gaza. So, the biggest fight for Israel
is this PR battle and they're losing and they're trying to stop it by working with police forces and governments
around the world to suppress speech in countries that like ours that in the
United States that has a first amendment. This is beyond outrageous and it shows going back to the very
beginning of this conversation what is the loyalty that US government feels towards Israel. Now I don't think it's
as clear-cut as Israel controlling the United States. Certainly not all of its foreign policy. The Middle East foreign
policy perhaps but I think there's overlapping interests in that region overlapping empires if you will. The
United States with a global empire and Israel with a regional one and they're working hand in hand. So their interests
are the same. And when they when they are no longer the same, I think you'll see the US pushing back a little bit.
Um, but they usually are the same when it comes to that region and that's the reason why they work so well together.

[admin]

Leaked US files reveal secret Israeli-Arab military pact targeting Iran amid war on Gaza: The Washington Post
The Cradle @TheCradleMedia
10/12/25

Leaked US military documents have exposed a covert security partnership between Israel and six key Arab states, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, forged under the leadership of US Central Command, even as these countries publicly condemned Israel’s war on Gaza.

Behind the scenes, the parties held years of secret meetings and joint trainings in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and the US, focusing on countering Iran and combating underground tunnel warfare used by Hamas and other resistance factions in Gaza.

The partnership, known as the “Regional Security Construct,” began in 2022 and quietly expanded through 2025, linking the countries into a shared air-defense network designed to monitor Iranian missiles and drones.

The leaked files also reveal US plans to establish a “Combined Middle East Cyber Center” and an “Information Fusion Center” to further integrate Israeli and Arab security capabilities. It also involved onboarding partners to a US-run secure chat system, distributing intelligence and operational material through the 'Five Eyes network' (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States), sharing radar and sensor data to build a joint regional picture, and coordinating information operations to undermine Iran’s narrative as the regional protector of Palestinians while promoting a partner narrative of prosperity and cooperation.

This shadow alliance was thrown into turmoil after Israel’s 9 September airstrike on Doha targeting Hamas leaders. Netanyahu later issued an apology to Qatar under pressure from Washington, but the incident exposed the fragility of the cooperation. US radar systems had failed to detect the Israeli strike because they were focused on Iran, a revelation that deepened mistrust among Arab partners.

While Arab leaders, including those of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have publicly denounced Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocidal,” their militaries were simultaneously working alongside Israel and the US on security planning tied to Trump’s ceasefire plan, which envisions Arab participation in Gaza’s postwar security arrangements. Around 200 US troops are set to deploy to Israel to support the ceasefire agreement, with several of the Arab states involved expected to contribute forces.

Last edited
4:21 PM · Oct 11, 2025

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Part 2 of 2

And of course, we can't just lastly saying that Aipac and the kind of money that they give or how they can fund your
opponent. They have such a lockhold over the uh political dem electoral process in the United States that they they get
everybody in Congress to go on board. Although even Donald Trump has admitted that Congress isn't so much in favor
anymore. And in that ad, you saw how they put AOC's picture up there when they talk about enemies of Israel. So
more and more people in Congress are speaking up against Israel. And this is what terrifies scares the crap out of
them in Tel Aviv. Yeah. Yeah. And uh and John, you know,
speaking of of this, I wanted to um play play this for you. You know, Netanyahu
has been making the podcast rounds, especially in the wake of all of the heat that Israel has received for
Jeffrey Epstein with Donald Trump's administration not releasing the files as they said they would and a lot of and
I know you've had comments on Jeffrey Epste's relationship to Mossad, Charlie Kirk saga, which really slammed Israel
to the point where Netanyahu to comment over and over again about how Israel had no role in Charlie Kirk's death. Then
you have also uh a lot of comments made about intelligence and I I want your opinion on what he says here about the
deep relationship between US and Israeli intelligence. We also produce these incredible weapons
that we share with the United States. We produce This might be the wrong This might be the wrong one. Um
let me see. Sorry about that. No, let's let's play this. I think it's the correct one. Here we go. intel that
is invaluable for the United States. You're familiar with the five eyes, Patrick. You know what that is? You know, all these countries that are
part of the American intelligence system. Well, there's a six of us, Israel. It's a very powerful eye. And we
share our intel with the American intelligence services. And that's why the bond is so strong. It's not only not
only a bond of values of our common Judeo-Christian civilization uh and it is really a war of civilization against
the barbarians that we're fighting but it's also uh it's also a bond of uh
utility of great success. That partnership is very very strong. I know it's challenged all the time but it's
very very strong and you should talk to some of the people uh in the higher places in the Pentagon. I wish you could talk to the people who share our
intelligence or the weapon systems that we share. I think that you'll discover that they appreciate uh as we appreciate
enormously what America gives to us. So uh John, maybe you can comment on on
this relationship that he is speaking about and how deep it goes. Sure. Israel is not the sixth eye of the
five eyes. They wish they were, but they're not. Certainly the relationship
between the CIA and the Mossad is is close, but it's not so close that they
that they can just walk freely around the CIA headquarters building like the Brits, the Australians, the New
Zealanders, and the Canadians can. When the Five Eyes were created after the 911
attacks, uh we were instructed to literally open the books. And so that's
what we did at the CIA. We literally open the books. And now when you go to CIA headquarters, you'll see a CIA
officer literally sitting next to an MI6 officer or an AIO officer or, you know,
a Canadian or whomever. There's not an Israeli sitting there. Like I say,
certainly the relationship is close. It's not as close as Netanyahu wishes it was. And and the the problem is that the
Israelis spy on us and the Israelis actively attempt to recruit American
citizens to to give them classified information. Like I said, they're they're all over American defense
contractors. Let me tell you a a story. When when the US uh Defense Department
developed the F-35 fighter jet, supposed to be the greatest fighter jet that's
ever been created, they cost almost a billion dollars a piece. Uh the Israelis
said, "Yeah, yeah, we want the first one." And we said, "Okay, we'll give you the first one. We're going to call it
the F-35I." I I for Israel. And what we're going to do is we're going to just
slightly degrade the avionics just in case, God forbid, you're shot down by
the Iranians, the Syrians, the Russians, whomever, and then they can't take the the avionics and reverse engineer them.
and they said, "No, we want the F-35. We don't want the degraded avionics." In
the meantime, the Emiratis came to us and said, "Hey, we heard about this F-35. We want we want the F-35." We
said, "Great. We're going to give you an F-35E for Emirates, and we're going to slightly degrade the avionics." And they
said, "Fine, we'll take it." The Israelis though
attempted to steal the avionics by infiltrating Loheed Martin and subcontractors that were involved in the
in the development of the avionics. That's why Israel is not a part of the
five eyes or the six eyes because we just can't trust them.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh maybe Joe you can elaborate on some of the distrust that
uh the US may be secretly harboring with Israel. I know Robert Perry while he wasn't invest the investigator of the
actual incident. Uh he did reference quite a bit uh the USS Liberty incident for example. Uh so maybe you can talk
about uh some of these tensions behind the scenes that kind of came up uh
honestly with the whole Charlie Kirk saga uh now with Jeffrey Epstein saga. Uh while these seem unrelated to US
foreign policy, they they seem they have deep connections. Yeah. I just uh wanted to just point out
that if someone I met who worked at Los Alamos for many many years said the Israelis would walk around there freely,
but maybe that's not the case at the CIA. Um Bob Perry, I'm sorry, could you
repeat what you said about Bob Perry? Um, oh that I know that he uh uh you know
would would reference the USS Liberty in which a lot of my audience a lot of my audience always reference whenever I
talk about the between the US and Israel. Yeah. Thanks. If you read some of these memoirs of presidents um or Netanyahu's
memoirs in fact um we we ran a review two-part review of his memoir by Abdul
by Assad Abdul Khalil our one of our columnists and he he openly talked about how he he had these problems in the
White House especially with Joe Biden vice president Joe Biden was screaming at Netanyahu and Obama hated him and
Clinton they all the American presidents they can't stand Netanyahu and this is what you get from these kinds of
anecdotal stories that leak out and yet they wind up doing whatever the hell Netanyahu wants. Why? It usually serves
US interest too as I said before or their own political domestic interest for these politicians.
Uh or they have blackmailable material about that. you know, uh, Ari Ben Mina,
uh, a former def Israeli defense intelligence person has been on our webcast twice, and he explained how, uh,
he knew personally because he worked closely with Maxwell that Jeffrey Epstein was indeed had a relationship
with, uh, the Israeli Defense Intelligence. And what was he doing with all those all those cameras that he had
in his mansion in Manhattan? So there's a lot of reasons why even when
it may not be completely in US interest or certainly not in the uh interest of an American president except for his
reelection that he's that they could hate Netanyahu and do what the Israelis want anyway. The USS Liberty was a good
example of Johnson buried Lynden Johnson, the president at the time. Israel fired on an American ship
and it became known that it was Israel fired and killed a good number of American sailors and it was swept under
the carpet by by Johnson. He just didn't want to make an issue out of it. This is an extraordinary incident that a lot of
Americans still don't know about. But it there's no there's no doubt at all anymore that Israel was uh attacked at
the Liberty uh in the Mediterranean and okay so they killed American sailors. So
what? So they walk around Los Alamos stealing secrets. So maybe which is how by the way forget about Los Alamos
earlier and I don't John might remember where they stole some of the secrets I believe was in Pennsylvania I think to
uh to build their own nuclear weapon which apparently John Kennedy didn't didn't want them to do but they did
anyway. Right. Of course with the French help and then South Africa etc. Um
there just so many stories of American leaders being upset with Israel or
Israel not doing things to help US interests and America going along anyway. And this example look uh take
the last American election. Uh the Democrats knew that their support for
Israel's genocide was destroying them amongst their own party, their own base.
And yet they continued to support Israeli genocide. So if the number one rule for any politician is get
reelected, do don't do anything. You could sell your mother rather than lose an election. And yet they sold out to
Israel and they lost that election. I maintained that if Harris had come and said we're we're going to stop arming
Israel, cut off the money if I'm elected. she could have gotten elected and maybe give national health insurance
for example. she would have been elected I think because they saw the Democratic party base was against what Israel was
doing and now it's grown even more now as we've seen especially not only young people uh in in de Republicans as well
are turning against Israel this is the population not the rulers not the leaders so they they hurt the democrats
hurt their own re-election chances in the last presidential election rather than stop the support for a genocide why
why this question cannot easily be answered. This is the underlying question in this entire interview,
Danny, that you're having with us. Why is the US always going along with Israel? I think it's money, the the the
blackmailable material and the overlapping interest, but there are other things maybe we don't understand.
Yeah. Well, John, I know you were on the inside for a bit and had to interact uh
with uh the Mossad and of course um you know the entire you were based in
Pakistan and I know you spent a lot of time in the Middle East, West Asia. Um I
did want to ask you about this as we um close, you know, about the technology.
You know, we we've we've seen the US and Israel both use decapitation. so openly,
so publicly now uh just assassination attempt after assassination attempt on the Hamas negotiators in Iran, Lebanon,
etc. with the pager attack. And uh now there has been an example of diplomats
being killed in a very strange car crash leading into what's going to be a
celebration of Trump's this Trump summit of the so-called ceasefire. um you know
uh supposedly the steering that of the car that these diplomats were in Qatari
uh diplomats suddenly uh stopped working properly and and they ended up crashing
and dying and I'm curious John about the technology that uh you know MOSA CIA
what they use to conduct these operations and you know we don't have any proof that it exactly was this but
but we know there's a litany of evidence that this has been tried attempted very publicly. So, uh, uh, your thoughts and
assessment on this and the technology of of how this all works. Well, thanks for that question because
it's it's actually very important. We know thanks to a whistleblower by the name of Joshua Schulty, former CIA uh
technical officer, that the CIA um presumably the Mossad, probably the
Chinese, maybe others, can remotely take over control of a car by hacking into
the car's computer system. They've been able to do it for years now with the
idea being that they can take over control of the car so that they can send you over a bridge or into a tree or an
abutment or kill you or do whatever it is they need to do to you. Um I don't
have any inside information as to whether or not the Israelis killed these three cuttery diplomats. I wouldn't be
surprised if they did if that were the case. Um, and I will say just, you know,
to be on the safe side, I don't mean to sound paranoid, but we live in a very strange world now. One of the things
that they taught us in CIA training, if this were to happen to you, is to you're
losing control of the car immediately, put the car in neutral, and pull the
emergency brake. It's the only thing that's going to allow you to survive. So, like I say, I don't have inside
information as to whether or not Mossad did this, but I can tell you Mossad certainly has the capability to do
something like this. Yeah. And your reaction, Joe, to just this overall um situation, you know, and
maybe we can close on this with you too. There's uh more show to come everyone but um just the overall situation how
you see it uh as we move into a new phase of this uh global situation visav
West Asia Gaza etc. beyond depressing and alarming. Um, we
even we didn't even begin to talk about uh Ukraine and the idea the US is
considering sending to Tom to Tommahawk missiles to uh to Ukraine to be fired into Russia despite Russia's clear red
line that this could lead to a nuclear exchange. The Biden administration played with that with the attackums and
now the Trump administration might send them. I mean Trump is completely irrational figure unfortunately. We
cannot really analyze what he does. I I see people everywhere trying to do a
rational analysis of an irrational man. So, we have no idea what he's going to do on that situation or anything else.
Um he's going to fly over there and sign this agreement this weekend if he hasn't already arrived there. I have no idea
why they would kill why kill three kati uh diplomats in the desert driving out to Shamal Shek. I that I don't
understand since they um you know the deal was signed and and those guys can't be that important. This is going to be a
big fanfare. It's all about him. Uh, and he's the most dangerous man you could probably have in charge. But not that
Biden was any less dangerous, as I said. So, I think the overall situation of the world could not be more fragile, could
not be more um dangerous uh and perilous as we uh try to move forward here,
watching this genocide proceed, watching the Ukraine war keep going. You know, it was about two years ago, last summer,
two years ago, that the German and French leaders, Macron and then Schulz, had a dinner with with Zalinski at in
Paris and they said, "Look, you got to give up. You're losing. Uh Germany and France fought so many wars and look,
they're friends now. Eventually, you're going to have to become friends with Russia." What happened to that? What
happened to that? The UK European leaders are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on rearming Germany. uh
where by the way free speech is under tra if you criticize Israel. Again I didn't mention Germany before. So what
is going on that the Europeans are playing with fire by trying to make um
it more and more dangerous uh by rearming Germany and Europe to fight a war making it sound like Russia wants to
invade every minute. Now, on the one hand, Angula, sorry, uh Ursula Vanderelion says the Russians have to
put washing machine parts in their in their airplanes, in their tanks, and Biden made fun of they can't even take
over Hak province. Look at these. And then they're going to be in Paris by December, by Christmas. So, which one is
it? Is Russia really a threat, or are they af bunch of bumbling, incompetent
military that can't even take over a part of Ukraine after two years? Well, clearly it's uh not they're not bumbling
and they don't have any there's no real threat. Even in the first Cold War, there was an exaggerated threat of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe.
We're seeing that again. And it's about the political careers. They put so much at stake, these leaders, that they
cannot be seen to lose to Russia. This is why it's so damn dangerous because Russia will not lose in Ukraine. They
see it as an existential threat whereas the Europeans see it as a political career threat. So we are in in a big
mess. Let alone I believe the genocide will resume without doubt in Gaza. We could have another major war in Iran.
Okay. What else? What else can we do? Dream up to make this the most dangerous
time that I could ever remember being alive. And I live through the Cold War. Yeah. And your your final words uh John
before uh we move on to the next segment. Really all we can do is is to keep up
the fight. That that's really it. you know, educate yourself, seek out truly
independent sources of of news, and keep up the fight. Well, great. I have both Consortium News
and John's Kerak John Keryaku's show, Deep Focus, in the video description. I
really appreciate both of you come on coming on. We have plenty of show to come. Uh, so please stay tuned. Thanks
so much, gentlemen. Thank you. I hope to see you again soon. Bye. Bye.
All right. All right. So yes, I want to bring on my next guest right away. Um,
we started a bit late today, so everyone keep hitting that like button, but we have a John Broka. He is the national
organizer for Black Alliance for Peace. He is also a contributing editor to Black Agenda Report. Ajama, it's good to
see you. Good, good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Of course. Of course. Everyone, hit that
like button so uh this conversation can still reach far and wide. So, Ajamu, you
know, there it's a very um I think a lot of people are holding their breath on the state of the world situation
overall. Uh there's a fragile so-called ceasefire in Gaza. One of the hopeful
things is that uh the resistance uh withtood the onslaught of the USIsraeli
genocidal campaign there. Uh but there's a lot of talk about now renew trade war
with China. Um, of course there are wars raging led by the United States all over
the world. Uh, maybe if you want to talk about your reaction to the overall world
situation and and what you feel is actually going on that people need to know about.
Let let me let me begin by by sort of this um
u attempt to contextualize my commentary um and start with the situation in uh in
Gaza. You know, I wrote a piece Danny that came out about a week and a half ago. uh
really it came out on the day right before the announcement uh that the Trump administration had engineered this
so-called peace uh plan and in that piece that came out in the black agenda
report I made the argument that uh this so-called peace uh plan
um when Trump announced that it was going to be accepted he had already released it I said that basically the
peace plan was no more than an attempt a cynical attempt uh to provide a a political
justification for the continuation of the genocide in in Gaza
uh for many of the reasons that I'm sure that your guests have been exposed to uh
including the very fact that uh beyond the exchange of the captives
there's no guarantees for for Palestinian rights there's no road map
to a a Palestinian state uh in fact even Gaza has been was was disconnected from
uh from the West Bank. Uh that there is the demand that uh the resistance has to
disarm and and and give its uh survival and the survival of the Palestinian
people uh to the good faith of two rogue states.
Um and that this entire um um performance was basically uh a
performance that was basically put in place to set us up uh to in fact once
the Israelis receive their uh the the hostages or the captives uh and then
find a way to to reig on the on the agreement. uh that it would be uh the
response would be well it's the fault of the Palestinian resistance.
Uh in the last few days uh Danny I see no reason to reverse that position. I
see this as again a cynical attempt to provide that justification. Uh this notion that this is going to lead toward
peace uh is ridiculous. in fact is bizarre and it's not based on the the
whims of of Donald Trump or anyone else. It's based on what I see uh and the the
organizations that we work with as the objective logic in place here that the
Israeli colonial project is not being driven by the by the desires of individuals who just have a desire to
dominate. Uh it is a project that has a material basis and that material basis
is basically to expand the project uh into the into Gaza and the West Bank to
expel the Palestinians uh to continue to expand and build what they refer to as a
greater Israel. And that desire is not based just on the desire for domination,
but the material realities that they see would be beneficial to the colonial
project, including the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas off the
coast of Gaza. There's a reason why they say that the Palestinian authority uh
cannot be allowed to uh to take over in Gaza, if you will, because that
authority, as corrupt and backward as it is, would have the legal status to make
a claim on those resources off the coast of Gaza, especially in light of the fact
that you have a number of states now, well, you had always had a number of states that recognized a Palestinian
state, but even the Europeans and pretending that they were opposing uh the genocide. Uh few of them came on
board. So the Israeli fascists understand that there they will be providing a headache for themselves uh
to allow a Palestinian entity with any kind of credibility to enter into into
Gaza. So there is no basis for the kind of enthusiasm that we've seen uh
throughout primarily throughout the West that this is some kind of breakthrough. Uh this is a continuation of the
imperial project. I wish it was otherwise. Uh but the objective logic of
this colonial project uh suggests to me that this is just a first step uh in the
continuation of their longerterm project to basically expand and to build a
greater Israel. Now, how does that relate to the other questions you raised? Well, uh, Danny,
this is all connected to again the desperate attempts on the part of of Western imperial powers, the what we
refer to as the axis of domination, the US, EU, NATO, uh, uh, axis of
domination, uh, to attempt to try to consolidate and expand their declining hijgemony um, in
particular under the leadership of of the of the United States of America. uh and the decision made by elements of the
US bourgeoisi uh to give its support uh to a Donald
Trump uh to advance a more aggressive policy to try to consolidate uh that
that that expansion uh of of US hegemony uh and to try to reverse the inevitable
declines we're seeing uh with US global power. So this fascist program, this
fascist project is not just the has not just emanated from the the diseased
minds of a Donald Trump, not even depended on Donald Trump, the personality, but the fact that this is
reflective of a particular kind of approach, a particular strategy, a strategy that's bound to fail, but one
other otherwise is something that has has a logic uh and a trajectory of his
own. And we see that with the u aggression uh the potential strike
against uh Venezuela, the uh probability of a strike against uh Iran and again
there is a a logic here and you know what the underlining logic of all of this too uh Danny is? It is the
containment policy on China. Ukraine is about China. Venezuela is
about China. The greater uh uh uh pro
the greater Israel project which is not just an Israeli project but a US project is about China and I could elaborate on
that as we go as we go forward. Yeah. Do you buy Jamu? what uh is being
sold in the western mainstream media now regarding the ceasefire, the breaking point being the strikes on Qatar that
Israel conducted in September of 2025 uh trying to kill Hamas negotiators
because we've heard throughout this whole period uh Trump yelling at Netanyahu, Trump is angry about Israel,
but yet things just kept going on and on and on and on and actually the US was ramping up support throughout this whole
process to the point of almost going to full war with Iran. So, do you buy do you buy what is being sold here? And uh
maybe you can expound upon also the resistance side of this and and what it all means because we see, you know, uh
the Palestinian resistance in the streets now during the ceasefire, people uh and Palestinians uh very much
enthusiastic about this. Um how how has the resistance fared through all of
this? What is your assessment of that as well? Well, I don't buy it for one moment that
there was some type of division between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Um, I think that what what what uh put them in a precarious strategic position was
uh after Donald Trump basically leaked the idea that something absolutely
terrible was going to happen to the Hamas leadership um that all hell would break loose or be
imposed on Hamas. Uh that they were very much aware of this plan. What sparked
the strategic uh precariousness of the uh of the US was when that plan failed.
They understood that the Qatar Qataris would be very upset uh if Hamas would
would be wiped out primarily because it would be uh in their territory. But they
felt that they would get over it. Okay. this was going to be the elimination of a of a of of an irritant that many
people had and that would allow them to continue with the project of of
eventually normalizing Israel and normal normalizing the relationships uh that
would consolidate uh Israeli US dominance of that region which is
strange also too uh that these these Arab Muslim states don't understand what's really in place. So, no, I don't
buy that. Uh, for for one moment, uh, Danny, that even though we see that, um,
uh, many, uh, Palestinians are are relieved, that they have a few days
where they're not going to be bombed, uh, where they won't be murdered in line trying to secure uh, some food for
themselves. uh but we we also understand that there
are many many Palestinians and many people uh throughout the global south who are very very uh cautious of what is
unfolding. As I said earlier, those of us who have been on the receiving end of
colonialism of the logic of of white supremacy, um we have we we can't afford any
illusions. And so we welcome the fact that there will be some some respit for
the Palestinian people. Um, but we also understand that the idea of of of
Palestinian people surrendering uh their right to resist, surrendering their
right to self-determination uh and independence uh to a a colonial
project uh and becoming in essence a a colonial trusteeship in Gaza um is a
decision that of course they will have to make but based on the sacrifice ices
of decades of resistance and the tremendous sacrifices of the Palestinian
people over the last two years. This would be a monumental betrayal that I
just don't see the resistance taking. Yeah. Yeah. And there's uh reports
already that uh all of the Palestinian resistance factions, Hamas, uh PI, PFOP,
that they refuse the big uh uh demand that uh the brokers on the Israeli side
and the US side have which is to disarm the resistance. They have rejected that. So uh it'll be interesting to see what
happens in the days to come. And Jamu, there has been a report, I don't know if you saw this, that I think relates to
what you were saying here. We have leaked US files actually that expose a secret Israeli Arab military pack
targeting Iran during what is happening in Gaza. Uh it was revealed by the
Washington Post that these documents that were written in 2022 to 2025
showing that officials from six Arab countries joined Israeli and US counterparts for a series of meetings.
Sorry, it's not pulled up. Here it is. Um, here's the overall article here in the in the cradle. Um,
so Israeli and US counterparts uh joined six Arab countries for a series of
meeting in Bah meetings in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar over the past three years, creating a regional
security construct, including perhaps Kuwait and Oman as potential partners of
this project. And what's interesting about this Ajamu is what they were preparing for in the training exercises.
Uh so they talk about how the training exercises uh have um
uh uh exercises that have to do with uh partners from the six countries participating in training to destroy
underground tunnels but did not name the countries. But we know Ajamu that uh one
of the primary forms of resistance that uh Palestinians have is a massive tunnel
network underneath uh Gaza. So your reaction to this? Where does this all uh
fit in? It's a it's a massive report. It's a massive revelation and it kind of confirms I think a lot of things that
people have been thinking who watch this show. It definitely does and I and I I haven't
had a chance to go through it in detail yet, but it's not surprising the premises that are in that report uh and
the kind of strategic diversion that they thought uh would allow them to carry out this uh this this this plan
against uh Iran. I guess that plan was somewhat um undermined by the ability of
the Iranians to respond in the way that they that they did. Um so this is just
another example of the kind of of arrogance that we see unfolding uh with
USled policy uh and the the treachery of
these uh Arab Muslim states that continue to uh to collaborate with the
US uh and the West to their own demise. uh you know I guess they don't
understand that you know in the end the Abraham Accords are uh is a framework uh
that will allow for the US um utilizing the the boots on the ground and in the
air of Israel for Israel to ba basically be able to consolidate control of that
region uh and the resources of that region politically ally uh and that is
what I referred to earlier in terms of the the underlying element here being
the attempt to try to contain and control China. you know, we we know
about the pivot to uh Asia under the Obama administration, which was mainly
basically sort of a military pivot, if you will, uh with the redeployment of significant uh military uh uh uh assets
to that to that region. The question was always what is what what what are the
political dynamics? Uh was the pivot just supposed to be relying on a
military force and some eventual war with the Chinese? Well, you know, the
possibility of war was always uh gamed out uh for US uh decision makers. But
the real strategy from what I could see is was that the real attempt to contain
China wasn't just military but in terms of resources. You know, we raised the
question over the last few years uh in particular under the um the with the
ascendancy of Donald Trump back into the presidency. If Donald Trump's real objective was the
Chinese, well, why would he pursue policies that objectively were
alienating his European partners? Wouldn't a a real pivot uh targeting uh
China be one in which there will be unity between the US uh and their western allies? Why is it that it seems
that he is pursuing a go it along if you will uh when it comes to uh to China?
Well, I would argue that they have made a decision before he even took power
that the road to Beijing uh started in West Asia and that if you can
consolidate your control uh over the resources of West Asia, if you can
destroy Iran politically
uh uh uh neuterized,
if you will Saudi Arabia uh that basically uh you had the ability to put
enormous pressure on the Chinese. So um
it all it all starts and ends with the Chinese this sort of pathological
um desire on the part of the decision makers in the US uh uh to um not be able
to come to terms with the the new realities of the world uh and to believe
that they can through uh hard and soft power actually uh reverse
the inevitable decline that we're seeing unfold every day uh here in in in on on
this planet as it relates to the continuation of the predominant power of the US uh and his western allies visa v
China. Yeah. Yeah. Great point, Sajjamu. And uh
I you know I was told and I think we've all been told uh by the Trump administration though that isn't the
focus now on the homeland? I mean we see US troops being supposedly deployed to
uh the you know to US cities Chicago etc. many US cities uh who now we see
Venezuela be targeted. Uh maybe bring it together for us to Javu because it is
being parsed out. There is this so-called shift that Trump is in his
administration is communicating now uh to the public both domestically and globally that the US is now focusing on
the homeland and look at how how how much ICE can be militarized. Look at how many police forces or national guard
forces can be deployed to US cities. Um but yet you know we still have these
wars raging everywhere including and focusing on China. What's what's your assessment? How do you bring it
together? Um I think when we connect the dots, we see that basically the successful
um the successful uh playing out of US policy internationally.
It really depends on u the authorities's ability to be able to contain resistance
domestically. the expansion of federal power into uh cities that are uh
politically administered by black people and Latino people where there are
sizable uh numbers of black and Latino um populations or they make up a
majority uh is part of a strategy to basically uh
uh terrorize um uh all potential opposition uh into
non-opposition is part of the commitment to using military force to advance uh US global
um interests. And so this is a war uh
right now is a one-sided war. When the Trump administration says to uh the
people of Chicago, you will understand in a few days why we have called the
Department of Defense now the Department of War. What is that than than a declaration of war and the unleashing of
this national police force called ICE in these uh uh environments uh is part of
that declaration of war and many people are are beginning to understand the
terms of this war and that's why we see that the resistance is intensifying
across the country and some of the divisions that we've had among left forces
uh in this country are now being um looked at looked at differently. We're now attempting to try to transcend those
differences. Many of us who've been in this movement for quite some time remember the kind of progress we were
making. For example, in the early 2000s uh building effective coalitions between
African people or black people uh and Latino folks uh in the United States that culminated in and the the great
marches that took place on in 2006. Uh and then we saw the response from the
state in terms of the intensification of of the raids. Um, and with the election
of Barack Obama, uh, the attempt to to undermine and distort, uh, this issue
and reframe it as an issue of immigration, um, and to intensify the targeting of of
Latino communities and then the efforts to try to divide the Latino people, the
Latino colonized people from the African colonized people in this country,
culminating in some of the back policies as we see that then emanated during the
uh the uh Obama administration where the the uh black politics began to be
redefined as a politics that was only focused on black people and issues of
class and colonialism was basically marginalized if it if it was dealt with at all. And so we now have a objective
situation where we can begin to to re readress those issues and to uh to uh to
reverse some of the mistakes some of the errors that were made uh a few years ago uh because if people don't understand uh
the terms of struggle if they don't understand that this war being waged uh in the US is being waged within within a
framework of of growing and consolidating fascism and that we are the targets, uh, then
they're never going to understand that and we will be in big trouble. So, you know, these are the connections that
need to be made. That's why it's so it's so um um
it's so disappointing that even after uh being exposed to the reality of of the
true nature of the western project and how westerners gave support to this
vicious genocide in Gaza. a genocide that at its core was um
informed by and justified by a a racialization of the Palestinian people.
Their nonhuman status, the degradation and dehuman dehumanization of
Palestinian people uh was a result of the fact that they are not seen as equal human beings. So this became a master
class in white supremacy and the nature of the western colonial project that
after these lessons you have so-called leftists who would even make arguments
that there is something some redeeming quality or possibility that US may not
be on the wrong side as they line up their forces to strike Venezuela.
We're being chastised into believing that there is a benevolent empire and
that just because the US is opposed to um to Venezuela doesn't mean that there
are not issues that leftists should be embracing as it as it relates to uh the
Venezuelan project. I mean that is such a naive, dangerous and backward
position. But it it is a a continuing element uh of this of of the left in the
US and in Western Europe. We say basically that whatever the internal contradictions, whatever the challenges
may be of the Venezuelan project is their project and that the international
balance of forces would be skewed in in the favor of Western imperialism if that
project was allowed to be destroyed. Who's going to take power uh in Venezuela?
this pig that was given the uh Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah.
Yeah. What kind of ridiculous? This is the kind of analysis we see coming from some elements. This is outrageous.
Venezuela is key to the liberation process in all of of of our Americas.
Okay. Look at the kind of disproportionate influence and power that these little backward monarchies
have in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, uh UAE with
with the the base of that being their petroleum resources. Uh Venezuela has
the largest uh uh known uh resources of petroleum of oil on the planet, 303
billion barrels of oil. But they've been contained. that have been undermined
because uh imperialism understands what could be done if they allowed to
participate in a normal way in the international economy. Uh and they
understand that that Venezuela is key to what is unfolding in Haiti, in Cuba, in
Nicaragua, in all of the the political uh projects that we have and we see
across the Americas. And so the strategy of the containment and the destruction
of Venezuela is front and center. And for any so-called leftist to not
understand that uh really I think it's reflective of the kind of bizarre nature of leftism or really the kind of
rightest not just tendencies but the kind of rightest uh character of left
politics in the United States of America. So we have a responsibility to defend uh the Venezuelan project uh and
to not and to purge ourselves of all sentimentality when it comes to the to
the the policies of this state. There's no such thing as a bene benevolent
settler colonial project called the United States of America. At the center of this project is violence just like
the naivity we see that people are expressing when it comes to uh uh Palestine. You can have peace as long as
you have the continuation of that colonial project. The the project
colonization at its core is a violent encounter. The conquest is violent. The
perpetuation of the relationships uh is a reflection of structural violence.
There will be no peace as long as you have the existence of of colonialism.
And that is just an objective fact. As long as we are alive, we will resist
colonization. We will resist the colonial capitalist system. That's just
an objective fact. And people need to understand that there's no reform of this process, folks. Okay? Either we
fight and win or we we we don't. Okay? And many of us who have been fighting for years say we're not going to give
this thing up. that basically we are clear uh about who we are and who our
friends are and who our enemies are. We are absolutely clear that there's never
been any historical uh uh uh case where the US has lined up on the right side of
history has lined up with the objective interest of the masses of the people.
Yeah. and Njamu. Um, you know, in the last few minutes that we have here, I wanted just you to comment on on this
reality that we see that that goes into what you were just saying. You know, you have the Trump administration literally
posing as a mediator. The only way that the Trump administration could have pose as a mediator if that there was kind of
base understanding or at least a widespread message sent especially to uh
people in the United States that the US can actually in fact be a mediator when it comes to uh these wars whether it's
Ukraine genocide in Gaza on and on and on. This is how the Trump administration has positioned itself or attempted to
this whole time. What's your comments on this? A final word on on the overall
state of things. Is it is any impossibility that the US
can be a mediator in anything? It is a an active uh participant. It has
objective interests if those u those interests are counter to the interest of
the struggling peoples of this planet. And so therefore is a is a is myth. It
is a uh a method to con to confuse people and we can't allow ourselves to
be confused. So we don't buy this. We don't accept it. We don't give uh
legitimacy to a state that has been operating outside of the confines of
international law for quite some time. Folks, the US is a is a rogue state. It
is undermining all aspects of international law and the United Nations charter. It has its objective interest
and its interest and the interest of its ruling clients are counter to the interest of the rest of us. Let's not
give any legitimacy to these processes. We can't afford to play games any
longer. We have to have clear politics and clear analysis. If you're not
prepared to struggle against the empire, then please just step out the way and
and don't say much of also because you're just helping to confuse people. This is a war, a war we don't really
want, but a war that has been imposed on us. We would love to live in peace. We are committed to the idea of peace, but
for us, you only have peace when you're able to contain and and defeat those
elements that are committed to war and conflict. And we name those elements.
Those elements are colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. we if we don't
defeat this pan European process this 500 years of European domination that's
coming to an end uh that basically is quite clear that they are committed to either maintaining white supremacy
globally or blowing up the entire planet we have to understand the terms of
struggle and make a decision where do you stand
John it was great to be with you today uh we can end on. I think that's a great note to end the show on. Please everyone
go to the video description where you can find Black Alliance for Peace. Uh the link is there. You can support them and all the work they do um on the
ground to uh fight the imperial albatross. Um everyone go to the video
description too to find all the places to support this work. Patreon, subsequent
gave a super chat. Thanks to all the moderators today. I'll be back in a few days and I'll make an announcement. But
until then everybody, take care and see you again soon. Bye-bye.

[admin]

The Rachel Maddow Show 10/13/25
Breaking News October 13, 2025



Transcript

... home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here. Uh I got to tell you right off the bat, you get two Rachel Maddo shows this week here on
MSNBC. I'm here tonight and then I will also be here again this week on Friday
night at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. I can explain. I will have more on that in
just a second. Bear with me, but you're stuck with me for two week nights this week. First though, um here's a weird
thing that happened today. You ready? After President Trump gave his speech at
the Israeli Parliament today, he then, you might have seen, he went to Egypt to
go sign things. We don't exactly know what the things were that he signed, but they purported to be related to the
Israeli Hamas ceasefire deal, the release of Israeli hostages today, the
release of prisoners held by Israel. Um, so he was there signing something in
Egypt and when he turned to speak at that event in Egypt, he said something
that I think even in the room struck people as a little bit strange. Now that is not an unusual occurrence for this
president. He is a meandering speaker. He often says stuff that seems out of context or inappropriate for the
audience to which he is speaking. But in Egypt in the midst of this big news day, it was weird. He turned and he said to
the strongman leader of Egypt who took power in a military coup. A guy who Trump in his first term called his
favorite dictator. Uh Trump turned to the microphone today in Egypt. And he said this. He said there was a reason we
chose Egypt because you were very helpful. Everybody wanted to have this. You are a great leader. You have very
little crime. Then he said, quote, "I want to thank you. He's been my friend right from the
beginning during the campaign against crooked Hillary Clinton. Have you heard of her?"
He's gesturing to the president of Egypt and saying, "He's been my friend
from the beginning during the campaign against crooked Hillary Clinton." Why is he talking about Hillary Clinton today?
today in the midst of everything else. Why is he talking about Hillary Clinton in Egypt? How in the heck does Hillary
Clinton do have anything to do with him being in Egypt with his relationship
with the president of Egypt? Yeah. Turns out, funny story, in Donald Trump's 2016
run for president against Hillary Clinton, one of the unexplained twists in that campaign
was that Trump picked a foreign leader to call his favorite dictator during the
campaign, which is not a typical thing that an American presidential candidate might do. You might think that the
American people might not like that, but Trump went out a limb and went out on a limb and did that anyway. um before he
was elected, he during the campaign, he he singled out the military strongman leader of Egypt as his favorite
dictator. He actually showered him with all sorts of inexplicable praise. And I
mean it was inexplicable because I mean this is not something for which there's like a big domestic audience during a
presidential campaign. Why do you want to vote for somebody for president who's praising who his favorite dictator is
and why he likes this military strong man abroad? It was so weird.
But he was really sort of insistent about it. Just a few weeks before election day, as Donald Trump's campaign
was running out of money, and it really looked like he was going to lose to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, at the
height of the 2016 presidential campaign, he took a one-on-one meeting with the president of Egypt.
And he came out of that meeting and he called the president of Egypt a quote fantastic guy.
He promised him that if uh he Donald Trump was elected president, the United States would be a quote loyal friend to
Egypt. And then when Trump in fact was elected, he very much made good on that.
He brought the president of Egypt to be one of his first guests at the White House. Egypt, really? He showered him
with totally unqualified praise. What's that about? Then he gave Egypt nearly
$200 million that his own Trump appointed State Department leadership opposed him giving. Then he gave them
more than a billion dollars after that. He just loved
loved the president of Egypt. Couldn't do enough for the president of Egypt. Couldn't say why he loved him so much,
but he just kept pouring it on. What was that about?
I want to thank you. Another one. He's been my friend right from the beginning during the campaign against crooked
Hillary Clinton. That was today. He's been my friend right from the beginning during the campaign against crooked Hillary
Clinton. I want to thank you. Something about his love for Egypt's president
goes back to his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. What could that be? Oh, right.
Last year, there was landmark reporting from the Washington Post, including our own Carol Lenig about one of the Justice
Department investigations into Donald Trump that was shut down by his appointees once he became president.
This was the headline. Quote, "10 $10 million cash withdrawal drove secret
probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt."
Now, when this story was published by the Washington Post, Trump's campaign, of course, called it fake news. Uh, but
here's what that reporting said. During his campaign in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, uh, the Trump campaign
really had run out of money. His advisers were begging him to put in more of his own money into the campaign, and
he was reportedly saying, "No, no, no. He couldn't do it, or at least he wouldn't do it." But then he met with
the president of Egypt. this inexplicable meeting he took at the height of the campaign with the president of Egypt and somehow shortly
thereafter he changed his mind about how much money he could give to his campaign. Yes, suddenly he could give
$10 million of his own money to his campaign in the last crucial weeks before the election. He had somehow come
up with $10 million that he felt he could afford to give his campaign.
Interestingly, at the time it was little notice, but he said he would give that $10 million as a loan,
not as a donation. So that meant he would expect to be paid back that $10 million.
Donald Trump at the very last minute supercharges his 2016 campaign with a $10 million loan right at the end. He
then does win the election. Does Donald Trump ever get that $10 million back?
that $10 million that he may or may not have been good for. I don't know. I don't know. But the Justice Department
reportedly found that 5 days before he was inaugurated,
mysteriously, an organization linked to the Egyptian Intelligence Service
withdrew almost exactly $10 million in cash from the National Bank of Egypt.
They stuffed bundles of $100 bills into two huge bags that weighed a combined
200 pound. It was nearly all the US dollar cash reserves that the Egyptian
government had. 200 pound of cash, $10
million cash loaded into bags and taken out of the National Bank of Egypt.
And poof, nobody knows where that money went.
Now, for seasoned investigators, like you'll find in the upper echelons of the
US Justice Department, it is theoretically possible to find where money like that might have gone.
But under Bill Barr, the Trump Justice Department shut down that investigation. So, the relevant bank accounts were
never looked at. What potentially could have been a gigantic bribe to Donald Trump to aid his 2016 campaign was never
traced. And so no one knows to this day officially why exactly Trump all these
years later is still thanking the strongman leader of Egypt for something
he did to help Trump in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.
I want to thank you another one. We've been my friends right from the beginning during the campaign against crooked
Hillary Clinton. Still thanking him all these years later.
front of mind whenever he sees the president of Egypt. All these years later,
today at that same event in Egypt, President Trump was caught on a hot mic talking to the president of Indonesia,
saying something about how he was going to set up a meeting for the president of Indonesia with Eric with Eric Trump, his
son, the blonde one, who manages the Trump family business. Eric Trump has no job in the US government. There is no
reason why an American president should be arranging meetings for one of his family members with the head of state of
another country, particularly when he's at an international meeting on official presidential
business. That said, that's appeared to be what he did today on this in this hot mic moment
at this event. Why Eric Trump? I don't know. But hey, look, just last week, Eric Trump was
promoting the Trump family's brand new golf course deal in Indonesia.
calling it a stunning golf destination. And now the president in his official capacity presumably is hooking up his
son who is running the family business with the president of Indonesia, the country that is hosting this new Trump
family boondoggle in that country. And that is not to be confused with the
Trump family boondoggle in Qatar, where the Trump family has a new golf course
and tower and luxury apartments or something or other. the nation of Qatar. Trump in his first
term said they were a funer of terrorism at a very high level. But then Qatar did
this deal for this new Trump luxury development in their country. And then Qatar gifted Trump a $400 million luxury
jet which he plans to refit at taxpayer expense for his own use as president and then not give to the next president. He
plans to then keep it for his presidential library after he lives leaves office. And now Trump has
announced that ifQ cutter is attacked, the United States will respond as if we have been attacked, which means he's
basically given them fake NATO membership on his own. Say so.
And then this I'm also proud that today we're announcing or signing a letter of
acceptance to build a Qatari Amiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home air
base in Idaho. the lo location will be uh host a contingent of Qatari F-15s.
The response to that announcement from Secretary of Defense Pete Higgsath was roughly
say what now? We're doing what in Idaho? Who has an Air Force base in Idaho now?
We're upon the former Fox and Friends weekend co-host, now Trump defense secretary had to issue what he called a
quotemportant clarification. [Laughter]
Uh, it's just them getting to use our Air Force base in Idaho. We're not giving them their own in Idaho. Did it
sound like that when I said it like that? That's so not what I meant, you guys. Important clarification.
But Trump is keeping Qatar's plane and the Trump family is building their big
golf and tower thingy in Qatar and presumably whatever else they want because that's the way the presidency
works now under Donald Trump. You put money in his pocket, you give money to his family, and he hooks you up with
basically whatever you want out of the pockets of the American people, from the American Treasury, literally
from the US Treasury. I mean, while the US government is shut down right now, it's one thing to have the president
leaving the country and flying to other countries as Trump did today. It's another thing to have the US government
funding another country's government while we are not funding ours.
Nevertheless, Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, just sent 20
billion, just sent 20 billion US taxpayer dollars to go fund the
government of Argentina to go bail out their currency. For some reason,
Argentina's currency has dropped 27% in value already this year.
But we're buying 20 billion dollar worth of it. Why is that? That doesn't seem
like a good bet. Don't worry, it's just a loan. All
right. Think we're going to get that loan back? I don't know. The IMF has had to bail out Argentina 23 different
times. Argentina owes the IMF more money than any other country on Earth. The
most recent IMF bailout was just in April, and even that wasn't enough to keep their economy and their peso from
continuing to tank. But apparently now it's us. Scott Bessett, Trump's Treasury
Secretary, nevertheless just gave Argentina $20 billion of your money to
prop up the government of Argentina, even though we have almost no trade with
them. And if their economy or their currency collapses, that would be sad for them, but it would likely have no effect on us. This is not something
we're doing to protect ourselves. It is just a favor to them.
Trump and Scott Bessant have given them 20 billion US out of the US Treasury. A
20 billion bailout that already appears quite possibly to be lost down a deep
dark well. Because even after Trump gave them this $20 billion infusion within
the last few days, CNBC reports today that markets today reacted in such a way
that indicates that $20 billion might not be enough. Argentina might tank anyway and that presumably best case
means that we'll never get our $20 billion back. Worst case, it means they're going to keep giving them even
more money that we'll never get back. Why, when our own government is shut
down, are we giving another country $20 billion to keep their government going
when again we have no links to their economy? Their risk has no connection to risk in our country. Why are we doing
that? I don't know. But there are at least two
American billionaires who are very close to Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant.
And these billionaires have made big bets on the health of Argentina's economy. So, you know, I don't know if
you had any plans for that $20 billion. It's your money. But for these rich guy friends of Scott Besson, including Scott
Bessant's former mentor on Wall Street, they stand to make a lot of money if the US taxpayer starts propping up that
failing country. And they stand to lose a lot if we don't. And that country
fails. So there goes $20 billion of your money
to buy nearly worthless pesos in Buenos Aries while you know Yellowstone shuts
down and people who work for the TSA don't get paid and American hospitals are white knuckling it through day 12 of
a government shutdown with no end in sight
the news right now. What's going on right now? This this is why every opposition movement to every authoritarian government everywhere on
earth focuses on the corruption and the self-deing and the self-enrichment of
the supposed strongman leader and inevitably his family and his narwell
sons-in-law and his cronies. Right? What happens when you rule lose the rule of
law? What happens when you lose a professional government? What happens when the democratic right to replace
your leaders is taken away from you? What happens is that the strong man and his family and his sons-in-law and his
cronies, they all make sure that they get very rich. They use the government of the country
to get themselves very, very rich.
And they think they don't ever have to answer to anyone ever. And so they do it shamelessly. They get everything for
themselves while for everybody else, for regular people, everything crumbles. They steal everything for themselves.
And for everyone else, it turns into just, you know, make do. Economic
insult. And the hollowing out of anybody else having any meaningful chance at
anything. And if you don't like it, the one thing they'll be very good at serving up is
repression. I mean, in a country that is losing its democracy, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do? Complain? Yes, actually. Yes. It turns out the
American people at least are going to complain about it, particularly about the mask secret police force brutalizing
people in the streets part of it, which we are experiencing right now. The American people are going to complain
about that in every way they know how, including while they are dressed in
inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex costumes. And when they are dressed up as frogs
and unicorns and axelotals and bananas, so many bananas and peacocks and pandas
and raccoons and spacemen and lobsters and sharks, we will protest and mock you
while dressed up as mushrooms and Pokemons and Spongebob Squarepants and
while dressed up as Bob Ross as as Bob Ross the painter wearing a Bob Ross wig
painting the ongoing protests around us. Protesters in Portland this weekend blew
bubbles at ICE agents and hula hooped at them. They formed a flash mob to do a
coordinated dance performance of the chaa slide. They held formal afternoon tea services. They went quote ice
fishing. They tied donuts to poles and pretended to lure federal agents with those delicious sugary pastries.
This form of absurdest resistance and protest and mockery in Portland started
with a guy in a chicken suit showing up at the ICE headquarters every day and one guy in an inflatable frog costume
showing up at the protest every day and not backing off even when the masked Trump goons pepper-sprayed the
inflatable frog in Portland, Oregon. They have been laughing at the fact that
Trump was trying to justify sending in the troops by saying this was a war ravaged city by showing in every way
they know how that Portland is just as wonderful and weird as it's always been. By this weekend, what local Portland
residents were calling Operation Inflation. They had dozens of people out
dancing and protesting in inflatable chicken suits and dino suits and mushroom suits. And we those we Oh, the
guy the yips. the guys from everything, right? They had a brass band out among the protesters, most of whom were
wearing banana suits themselves. At least some members of the banana
block brass band were pepper sprayed by federal agents because, god forbid there
be a band, at least one member of the band was arrested while committing the crime of playing the clarinet.
And because Portland is Portland where every year they hold a naked bike ride
because a why not and b to show the vulnerability of cyclists so drivers
take care to not hurt cyclists on the road. That is the basic idea of the weird and wonderful annual Portland
naked bike ride. This weekend they did an extra one. They held what they called an emergency naked bike ride. An extra
one this year. Oregon Live reports that at the start of it at the Oregon Convention Center where there it was 53
degrees, there were about a thousand people turned out for the emergency naked bike ride, by the time people got
to the Portland ice facility, there were several thousand people on bikes
in various states of undress protesting against Trump and ICE and him
wanting to send troops into that city. Have you ever loved Portland more than you do in this moment? People
turned out in big numbers in Williston, Vermont this weekend where they are trying to expand the ICE facility there
and locals say they are having none of it. In Memphis, Tennessee this weekend, US military veterans set up an
encampment at city hall to protest troops uh to protest Trump sending troops to that city. in Columbia,
Missouri. This weekend, people from the excellent local music scene came out to protest and essentially play a live
protest show at City Hall after ICE came in and took the guy who does security at
the Blue Note and the Rose Music Hall, those legendary music venues in Columbia, Missouri.
In Chicago, we're going to speak tonight with the Reverend David Black, who has been part of protests in that city and
has been pepper-sprayed and shot in the head with pepper balls while he was in the act of praying. Today, Chicago
community leaders led a protest at the ICE facility in Broadview. Democratic Congressman Raja Krishna Morty asked to
be led into that facility to see that facility as a member of Congress. They're supposed to let him do that
under federal law, but today they would not let him inside. We're going to talk tonight about the
remarkable, very moving Catholic eukaristic procession that happened at
that ice facility yesterday with Catholic priests and nuns. More than a thousand Catholics supporting that
procession as the priests were turned away from that facility as well. We're going to be speaking with Pastor David
Black again here in just a moment. We're also tonight going to speak with one of the founders of Indivisible
about what are expected to be absolutely massive no kings protests this weekend.
This is happening this Saturday, October 18th, all over the country. These protests this Saturday, as I said,
they're going to happen everywhere in more than 2,000 locations.
If past prologue, this is on track to be one of the largest protests in American history this Saturday.
So, we've got all that all that coming up coming up this hour. A lot to get to this hour. One last thing, though. Let
me just take one uh point of personal privilege here before we get to those stories and to our guests tonight. Um I
mentioned right at the top of the show that there are going to be two Rachel Matto shows this week. I'm here tonight,
right now, like you're used to seeing me on Monday nights. But I'm also going to be here on Friday doing another show
Friday at 8:00 p.m. Um, that is because Friday at 900 p.m. This is the night
before the big No Kings protests. Friday at 9:00 p.m. I've got a new documentary
that we are premiering here on MSNBC. So, that is why I'm going to be here Friday. I'll have a special Rachel M
show 8 o'clock. We're going to show that doc at 900 p.m. Um, as you might know, I
changed my schedule here at MSNBC over the last couple of years. I'm generally
here just one night a week now instead of being here every night. The reason I made that change in part is because I
want to spend my working hours working on a lot of different stuff right now
beyond the nightly TV show that I was doing before. So, that includes this new documentary that I'm going to show on
Friday. That includes books that I've done, podcasts. Tonight, um, in Manhattan, the Edward R.
Muro Awards are being given out. It's a big important journalism award. I am not
there at the awards tonight accepting one of those awards. Um, I'm not there because I am here live with you, but
tonight my podcast Ultra is getting an Edward Armoro Award, which I have to say I'm really proud of. I don't generally
believe in awards and things, but this is a big deal. Um, if you haven't listened yet to Ultra Sea, I think it's
helpful for where we are in this moment. I think it's one of the best things I've ever done creatively.
Um, but that podcast, Ultra, which is winning that award tonight. Also, the
next podcast that I've got coming out before the end of this year, which I haven't told you about yet. um and this
documentary that I've got coming out on Friday, they are all a part of the same thing to
me. Um they're all part of what I consider sort of to be my work right now in this moment, which is that these are
all different stories, different lessons about how to fight really hard fights in America, how to fight the government
when the government is doing terrible things, how to fight authoritarian movements in this country. This has been
sort of a series for me. Ultra, my book prequel, the next podcast that I've got
coming out, and this documentary that I've got coming out on Friday. It's all about how hard it is to fight those
fights and how noble it is and how worthwhile it is. And specifically with this new documentary, it's about the
real unglamorous, very difficult work it takes behind the scenes to be part of a
big movement like that that wins. Uh, so again, so that's the film. It's
going to air this Friday night at 900 PM here on MSNBC. I'll be here at 8:00 PM Eastern for a special Rachel Matto show
ahead of that on Friday. But we got lots to get to tonight. Stay with us. [Music]
It was an almost unimaginable number. More than 5 million Americans turned out in small towns and big cities all across
the country for those no kings protests against the against the Trump administration back in June. that no
kings day protest. That one day in June is considered to be one of the three largest days of peaceful protest ever in
US history. There were so many demonstrations on No King's Day in June that when we covered them here on this
show the following day, we had to show them in batches of 20 to even scratch
the surface of how many of them there were. Well, now the second No Kings Day is just around the corner. It's this
Saturday, October 18th. And the organizing effort around it so far indicates that it might be even bigger
this time around. In June, for those huge, huge protests, they got like 2100
different protests. This time for Saturday, organizers are expecting more than 2500, even more than we saw in
June. Joining us now is Ezra Leven. He's co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, the group that has helped
lead the organizing for the No Kings Rallies. Uh, Mr. Leven, it's nice to see you. Thanks for being here. Great to see you, Rachel.
What are you expecting for Saturday? I'm expecting it to be huge. I'm expecting it to be boisterous. I'm expecting it to be joyful. It's going to
be the place to be, Rachel. I mean, it really is. I hope people are I mean, we're doing big things here, right?
We're collectively fighting for democracy. That's big. That's serious. Trump is saber rattling, and that can be scary. But fundamentally what this is
about is everybody coming together and demonstrating we don't do kings in America and they're going to have funny
signs. There's going to be chanting. There's going to be dancing. There's going to be singing. We want this to be a place where anybody can come out. And
it doesn't matter your ideological persuasion. It doesn't matter who you voted for before. It doesn't matter if you've never protested before. This is a
place for you if you believe we don't do kings in this country. We're in this moment where um Republican leaders,
particularly House Speaker Mike Johnson, uh but also other Republicans, have tried to really like fearmonger about
the no Kings pro protest. He called he said it was a a planned hate America
rally, which made me laugh out loud. Um but I have to ask obviously they're trying to scare people into not
protesting or trying to make it seem like a scary thing. On the other side, we've got protests in Portland erupting
into dance parties and like everybody with share on the boom box and like dancing inflatable frogs and the
everything. H how do you what what do you make of the Republican effort to really demonize protest against Trump?
Look, on the one hand, I welcome the free publicity. I'm glad they're talking about what will be the largest peaceful
protest in modern American history coming up on Saturday. And it's also funny that they can't actually say no kings. They've got to make some other
name up for it because they understand it. They say no kings. How is that objectionable? How could anybody say
that that's anything other than the most American thing since apple pie? But I do think we have to hold two things in our
head at the same time. One, anybody who's been to a protest this year that's been organized by indivisible or no
kings has seen moms and grandmas and kids and dogs and funny chants and it was a feeling of joyous power out in the
streets. And on the other hand, we've got an authoritarian regime who wants to crack down on free speech. So, we should
show up in force and we should take care. We should attend the security training briefings. We should attend the
how to deescalate briefings and trainings. We should do that work so that if anything happens at these
protests, we're ready to do it. But if your First Amendment rights are under attack and you decline to show up
because of those threats, you don't have First Amendment rights. So, if anybody is out there watching this and like,
well, I don't know.

[admin]

U.S. CANNOT SAVE ISRAEL — The Empire Is Cracking | Larry C. Johnson
Oct 13, 2025



Transcript

I don't know if now's got blackmail information on Trump or what. Again, this may go back to the Epstein case.
Um, but you know, Witkoff himself is a is
a confirmed Zionist and you know, Trump has bought into the
whole, you know, he's he's had a long long relationship and I think some of it has been financial certainly. I mean, we
saw that with money provided by the widow of Sheldon Alderson,
but um it is Trump is going out of his way to try to
protect Netanyahu. And I think Netanyahu go down in history as one he'll be right
up there with Paul Pot and you know the the Mao and others that are viewed as
you know mass murderers because he's presided over the mass murder of Palestinians.
Today Donald Trump asked the president of Israel to pardon Net
and I don't know if he has this sort of you know power in Israel to do that. Do
we know if the president of Israel can pardon Neta? I I don't know. Good question. I'm just
I'm not schooled and if he was in that position he would have done it before.
But you know, you would think um you know, but Netanyahu is not that popular.
But we shouldn't confuse Netanyahu's lack of popularity with the fact that the majority
now even, you know, more people now in Israel support getting rid of the Palestinians than was the case two years
ago. Because two years ago, you still had a number of Israelis living there who have since left. you know, the
Israelis who opposed the the genocide, uh, they've left the
country. They they've gone other places.
Nar, when it comes to this fundamental question about Israel, which in my opinion would
be, can peace be imposed in Israel? Is is Israel capable of making peace in
your opinion? No. the you've got 800,000
settlers that are invading the West Bank and and taking property from Palestinians
uh to stop them would create a civil war
within Israel. They would they would fight against the Israeli Defense Force.
So, Israel has just decided to let them to let them go and to take control of
the country, which is what they're going to do. That's why that's why this whole peace, you know, Trump's peace plan is
it's it's just a mirage. It's an illusion. Yeah. We got, you know, here
we're in phase one. They're going to release hostages and prisoners. That'll happen.
But then when it comes to phase two um the notion that has that Hamas and it's
not just Hamas you know there besides Hamas there are 13 other groups you know
popular front for the liberation of Palestine Palestinian Islamic Jihad uh
the democratic front for the liberation of Palestine uh Abu Nidal is still
around or group bearing his name and you know I don't recall all the other names
but there you know a total of 14 groups and uh they each have some military
capability. So the to give up their arms, you know,
the other thing that's actually taking place right now is Hamas secure. You know, Hamas has security forces and they
are now going after these Palestinian collaborators, the ones who were bought
and paid for by Israel and, you know, helping betray uh Palestinian
leadership. So, they're they're taking them out and killing them now. So, that's going on. The the odds that they
will get an effective disarmament of Hamas, I don't see it.
I would I you know I could be proven wrong but I doubt it.
And the same thing with the uh on the other side of the equation is the the
settlers and and this the Bengavir and Smootrich community.
They're not going to give up on taking full control of the Al Axa mosque
and destroying it and rebuilding the the temple because rebuilding the temple,
the Jewish temple is critical to their whole end of end of the world scenario.
So, you know, this there there is uh the
idea would be for Israel to say, "Okay, look, we recognize the Palestinians are are human beings.
They are people like we are. They are loved by God as we claim to be
loved by God. And therefore, they we will, you know, we'll let them live in
peace. They'll have they'll have their territory. not an open air prison, which is what
Gaza has been, and the West Bank, which is a the West Bank is supposed to be
entirely for the Palestinians, and the uh the Jewish settlers keep encroaching on it, and the world condemns them and
imposes some sanctions, but they continue to get away with it.
They're going to talk in Shal Masheek in Egypt. And who's going to attend this
summit is going to be the United States, Arab States, who else? Napo, it seems that
he's not going to be there. Hamas is not going to be there. Yeah. So, yeah, we're having a we're
having a summit, but all the key players that have actually are in the fight, they're not going to be there. Yeah, it makes sense.
It's this is all political theater. I mean it is it's just it's it's
disgraceful. This is more of a photo op to you know make Donald Trump feel good. You know
continue to tell oh I brought peace. you know, he did this in January and it
ended in March, you know, so this this one too is, you
know, the the the all the celebration and, you know, good news surrounding what happened today, that's that's going
to go away. Uh the question is whether Israel will
be able to continue to sustain combat operations. I mean, look, it's
it's easy to kill unarmed women and children, which is what they've been doing. Um,
but you know, Hamas, I'm sure, is going to take advantage of this time to rebuild, re re-equip
and be ready for the next round. I don't think they harbor any illusions.
Larry, the second step after releasing the prisoners, what would that be?
because we had the same with Lebanon. Mhm. It has we have we haven't seen the
second phase of you know the the the ceasefire, right? Is that the case for Gaza? And how is
that going to be the Trump's policy if Net decides the day after they get all
the prisoners they get back to Gaza and again attacking Gaza? Well, the the the
creation of a governing authority, but uh again, the United States has
completely discredited uh the Palestinian Authority. Remember
the pal none of the Palestinian government with Abu Abbas, even though
he's been just a complete tool of the West, were were allowed to go to New
York City for the UN General Assembly. So the uh the Trump Jared Kushner Steve
Whit plan probably consists of outsiders that are completely controlled by the
West becoming the ruling authority. Um
the I I but I think there's a difference within the Arab Muslim world that
they're not going to go for that. So even the specifics of how that's going to be implemented to my knowledge that's
still up in the air. Uh then the second thing and you saw it uh in Lebanon as
well, the disarmament of Hamas or the disarmament of Hezbollah.
Well, how's that disarmament of Hezbollah going? They haven't disarmed and they've
refused to disarm and the Lebanese arm is not strong enough to do it. So, you
know, you're going to say, "Oh, who's going to go disarm Hamas?" You know, we got they put 200 US
soldiers in there now who ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid.
As long as the US soldiers, but that again, that's not their job. That's not what's that's that's not a military
mission. So uh if the United States decides to
somehow get involved in the war and you start getting US soldiers killed
as occupiers then you know this again this this peace
process will collapse. So, I I don't think nobody would ever go bankrupt by
betting that the Israeli uh Palestinian conflict is going to come
to an end. Uh the because odds are we've seen it time after time after time. BB Netanyahu
and the Zionist crowd are not interested in a twostate
solution. They don't envision any way that they could live side by side with
these Palestinians. And so, you know, I that that to me
looks like an irreconcilable difference.
You know what's so in my opinion so naive? If you put US troops on the
ground in Gaza, that would hugely, you know,
that is so much problematic. Mhm. Because if if you see the possibility of
false flag operation, something against US troops to make it that it was Hamas,
it was you, you're not helping the situation. You are going to worsen the situation.
You're going to force yourself to be part of genocide. You're not suggesting, are you, that
there are elements in Israel that might stag the killing of a bunch of US soldiers in order to get the United
States involved militarily? Oh, come on, Nemoth. So naive.
Yeah. No, I I think that's that's an excellent observation. Uh your your
suspicions are well warranted. You know, there there's a history here. Um, and
again, the Zionist perception, the one
the the political backers of Donald Trump here in the United States
genuinely believe that um this this is going that the Arab
Muslim world are rallying around Donald Trump, that they hate Hamas.
and uh that there will be no support for Hamas. I you know I think that's wrong. I think
if if the they're failing to read the room properly that US influence in the
Arab and Muslim world has diminished not increased
u and you know the the attack on Qatar a month ago by Israel with US assistance
uh helped accelerate that. Yeah. The core issue, Larry, by the way,
which was mentioned in the Trump's so-called peace plan in point 19,
they're talking about the Palestinian state. But even with that concept, you
see Marco Rubio, I don't know if you saw his interview about the the article
number 19, which was mentioned Palestinian state. He he's not he's not
after that. He's not even considering that for Palestinians. He says in a long
run I don't know how many years is that's the sign that we are talking
about it we have been talking about it because two-state solution is some sort of turning into some sort of delusional
you know solution for what's going on here is what Marco Rubio said Larry
states support a Palestinian state because point 19 in your white house plan talks about a credible pathway to
Palestinian self-determination and statehood. Well, again, we've always said, I mean, this has been a consistent position
throughout that the only way you're ever going to have anything that looks like statehood is in a negotiated deal with the Israelis. We are so far from that
right now. Prime Minister Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state and thanked President Trump for speaking against recognition
of one. That's why I'm asking you to clarify. Well, we haven't recognized a Palestinian state. The United States does not. And right now, there's no
doing that because it's not even possible. Well, that's not even a realistic thing right now because who who would govern that Palestinian?
Well, it's point 19 in your plan. Who would govern it? I thought, well, but that's talking about a pathway longterm and in the future. But one of
the before you can even get there, okay, that's, you know, before you can even get there, you have to have someone to turn that land. Israel's made clear they
have no interest in governing Gaza. They have no interest in occupying Gaza long term and and being the government of
Gaza. I think Israel, I can't speak for Israel, but I think Israel would tell you they would love to turn over Gaza to
a Palestinian organization that isn't terroristic. They would love to do that, but that doesn't exist right now. That
has to be built and that's going to the rhetoric is so, you know, is so
thick that you don't know how to deal with it. Put put on your hip waiters. You're
going into the swamp and you got all this nasty feted water uh lapping around
you. Yeah, you know look this this entire
you know political creation the creation of the state of Israel and
then the territories that were ostensibly under the rule of the Palestinians.
It's just it's artificial. It was created by the west really by you know ultimately Britain's probably primarily
responsible uh for it once say once the Ottoman Empire lost control of that area. So uh
Israel is an artificial creation and and this notion that you know we're
not going to let the Palestinians determine who gets to rule Palestine, who gets to govern them because we want
to control it. this it's all a charade. It's just it's
it's a it's a total farce. Um you know I I don't I don't know if the Palestinians
will survive and be able to have a a a
particular geographic region in that area that they control. I don't know if
that'll happen. Um the prospects don't look good for Israel either long term.
So um it is we've got a lull in the
fighting. That's all we've got right now. And people are praising it as some great uh peace accomplishment and it's
all it's all Washington spin. So you know we're going to we got the
images. I'm just got the TV on here and they're showing all the jubilant Palestinians and uh as as loved ones
climb off the buses and they show the the jubilant Israelis who are, you know,
starting to receive uh these milit they're really military prisoners of
war. These so-called hostages that Hamas took. These are all military personnel
right now. That's all that I think that's all that's left. Uh, so sorry. You know, when you capture when you
capture somebody wearing a uniform and a gun, that's a whole different uh situation than when you take a a
civilian that is not militarily engaged.
Larry, here is what Donald Trump said today in Israel about Iran.
So much death on the Middle East. The hand of friendship and cooperation is
open. I'm telling you, they want to make a deal. That's all I do in my life. I make deals. I'm good at it. I've always
been good at it. And I know when they want, even if they said, "We don't want to make a deal." I can tell you they
want to make a deal. All right? They do. They want to make a deal. And we're going to see if we can
do something because this is crazy what's happening, and we're not going to have this anymore. Neither the United
States nor Israel bear the people of Iran any hostility. We merely want to
live in peace. We don't want any looming threats over our heads. And we don't
want to even think in terms of nuclear destruction. It's not going to happen. Never will.
Just to show the contrast of what Donald Trump said and what Netna said the day before, here is what Netna said. And you
see that when Donald Trump is talking about peace and deal with Iran and new deal with Iran, Netna is not that much
happier. Yeah. Here is what Natio said there. So much amazing victories that amazed
the entire world. But I'd like to tell you that wherever we fought, we won. But
to the same degree, I must say that the campaign has not ended. There
are many security challenges ahead of us. Some of our
enemies are trying to rehabilitate themselves in order to attack us again.
But we are on it as we say. Yes. There are many opportunities.
Yeah. Yeah. He literally saying something totally different from what
Well, number one, Israel is the one that's attacking everybody else. It's not everybody else attacking Israel.
That's number one. U number two, you know, Iran was already open to making a
deal with the West. It was the West that rejected it. It was Donald Trump who
betrayed them, who allowed uh Israel to attack Iran in the midst of negotiations.
So now what what uh this you know screwed up policy by Donald Trump and
with BB Netanyahu has achieved is that previously Iran was uh signed on to
cooperating fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency. No longer they're booted out of the
country. Uh the the the odds are high that Iran will probably reject and walk
away from the non-prololiferation treaty. uh they will u they'll be positioned.
They could rapidly create a nuclear uh weapon if they wanted. That's not what
they're doing. But they have solidified and strengthened their ties with China
and with Russia and militarily, diplomatically, politically
uh much stronger today than it was uh you know in you know 4 months ago in
June or in in May. So with this uh you know Trump I'm sure
he believes that he wants to negotiate a deal with Iran and and I think if Peskin
and others they're they're still open to that but they're not it's going to be
you know it's going to satisfy Iran's demands and and you know look we've seen
over the last month that instead of
the relief. Yeah, there we are. The relief from sanctions um
under the uh JCPOA that uh no, they snap, you know, they
basically said, "No, that you're going to we're putting all the sanctions back in place." Now, the reality was those
sanctions had never been lifted. Okay? the sanctions that were in place prior to the signing of that uh uh joint
comprehensive uh peace agreement uh back in 2015.
Those sanctions were really never lifted. They continued to be enforced or
to be applied and now they're quote snapping back. Well, you know, if it's
already there, it's not it's not back. It's you know, it's been there
So yeah, we're getting got connectivity issues today. I I don't know what's that.
It's stream It's Streamyard. God, I hate Streamyard. I I don't know what's that. Yeah, I
Larry, if you were, you know,
you know, working for, you know, and let's assume if you were Iranian sitting in Iran and you see Donald Trump on one
on on one part and Net on the other side, you see these two sort of
different arguments coming out. Which one do you believe the most? Which one do you understand or do you you know
gives you the honest way of their feeling about
you? Oh, Netanyahu. You know, not Trump. You know, Trump's a
used car salesman. You know, you can't trust a single thing Donald Trump says. You know, he he flips
flop back and forth. uh you you know give give BB Netanyahu
credit. At least he's he's consistent. He he he lies in English, but when he's
speaking Hebrew, man, he's telling the truth about exactly what they're thinking and what they're going to do.
And you know, if I'm an Iranian intelligence officer or politician, I pay attention to what he's saying in Hebrew
because he usually means what he says.
I don't know if you it wasn't it wasn't in English that many people you you know
couldn't listen and watch it. It was Ali Sham Khani who was the head of
negotiations Iranian negotiators with Donald Trump and his administration. The
Israelis tried to kill him, tried to kill him, assassinate him during during the war,
you know, in initial hours of the war against Iran. He said that he somehow
confirmed that Iran was somehow hesitant in getting closer with Russia and
accepting, you know, the partnership, strategic partnership with Russia before
the war between Iran and Israel. that has changed and he confirms that that
has changed. Iman is not there anymore. Yeah, I've been saying that all along.
Um so it's it's good to know that I've got confir you know there's confirmation that I'm not just bloiating.
Um yeah. Yeah. because you know it's it's it's fascinating
that how these countries and so you know these countries in a way
they're artificial creations and what I mean by that is um they acquire an
identity and a lot of times it's tied to what the ethnic base of the country is but not always and then we we got these
leaders who are symbols of of those of those countries
and we assume that they've got this great knowledge and this great insight and that they're you know that they
understand what's going on. We may not, but boy, they there's somebody at the top. And then you realize, no, man,
they're they may be more stupid than than the average person in the country.
Uh, and or have these naive beliefs. And we we actually we saw that in Russia,
too. you know, up until I'd say up until uh the start of the special military
operation, you had a large number of people in Russia that believed that, oh, all we got to do
is change the even Putin, all we got to do is change this or convince the Americans that we're not the communists
of old and they'll like us. And he realized it it has nothing to do
with you. They hate you because of there's there's
not a thing that the Russia can do that's going to make the West like them.
Similarly with Iran, Iran is hated because basically it has
shown independence of western control and broken away from being subservient
to you know accepting the rule by the western elite
and and there's no co there's no dream of peaceful coexistence.
And so instead the west has created this uh mythology that Iran is this terrorist
nation promoting international terrorism around the world when in fact the west
has carried out more assassinations and more terrorist attacks the United States
has backed more terrorist attacks in Iran than you know I I don't recall I don't
think you can point to a single terrorist attack in the United States in the last 40 years that was at the behest
of Iran. Whereas we've got we've had multiple nuclear scientists assassinated
in Iran with Western backing. We got the United States funding now the Mujahin Al
the terrorist organization that is carrying out terrorist attacks. But again, reality doesn't matter.
Is that going to in your opinion if Iran as as we know as I learned from the
Iranian media from the talks recently they had with these officials important
officials in Iran mostly in Persian unfortunately because it would be amazing to to be translated to reach to
wider audience outside of Iran but unfortunately we don't have it But after all, it seems
Iran has decided to, you know, to strengthen the relationship
between Iran and Russia and China, which would be it's not just for the time being. It's for the future. It's for the
their plan. They don't see any sort of future with the West, with the United
States under both Republican or Dem Democrats. Correct. Correct.
They tried with both. Go ahead. No, no. I'm just saying there's no um
anybody who tries to make a political case for normalizing relations with Iran
is political suicide here in the United States. Uh and so that that's not going to change until the United States
suffers some dramatic consequence and and tragic consequence
from its constant meddling in in the affairs of other countries. you know, we we we're we we become a we
become a bully and we like being the bully and we
continue to try to coersse and threaten other countries. But you know the the real the world has changed and is
changing and in fact you're seeing that right now in this uh trade war with
China. China's finally called Trump's bluff
because um and I I didn't realize this until I read a read something yesterday
that um until recently,
you know, let's go back a couple of years, uh China was actually dependent
on helium exports from the United States. So the overall trade relationship
between China and the United States is not the it's not the dollar amount that's critical to that relationship
rather it was the actual com things that are traded you know what China produces
and sells to the United States and in this case helium that the United States sold to China. Well China recognized we
got a vulnerability there. they embarked on creating alternative sources and so
now as of this year apparently the dependence on the United States has fallen to like 5%.
So that's not you know they can live without that and but they also know the
United States cannot live without the rare earth minerals uh the magnets
um the pharmaceuticals uh there are a number of very critical items that the United States does not
have alternative sources for yet and it's years away from being able to develop those.
So, China played a big Trump card and Trump with all of his, you know,
threats, etc. Uh, he he, you know, they say, "Okay, well, we'll we'll we'll stop
giving him access to Boeing airport airplane parts." Oh, so the United States is the only
country in the world that makes aircraft, commercial jetliners.
Think again. Brazil makes some. I think France
actually has an Airbus industry if I'm not mistaken. And Russia has just rolled out its first
uh plane produced entirely with Russian components. So Russia is
now in a position they've they've developed the technology.
All they have to do is go to the Chinese and say, "Hey, partner. You want to turn all your Chinese
workers loose on creating these new planes?" And you can tell the Americans to go pound sand.
And so here's Trump again, oh, you're not going to get any more Boeing. Then all of a sudden, nobody's buying Boeing
because it's not like it's got a great reputation anyway. So again, this whole bullying aspect as
uh and they've tried it with Iran. All it's done is driven Iran closer now to
China and Russia where as you correctly pointed out previously they were they
they wanted to keep him at arms length cuz they secretly deep down we want to be friends with Russia or I mean with
the United States and they finally come to relation a realization it's it's a damn abusive relationship
have being being friends with the United States is like you being friends with a
black widow spider or or an angry cobra, something that can
kill you and harm you. And then finally, it looks like the Iranians have awakened and said, "Okay, man. Yeah, we're not
we're not dating that toxic person anymore."
Do you every time Donald Trump do something against China, it's somehow amazing to
me how can he believe that the outcome would be positive for the United States.
Every time it backfires and well the you know our friend Pepe
Escobar, you know, you and I have both had him for interviews to describe his
latest adventure in China and the the picture he paints based upon being there
is that you're not seeing just it's one thing if Beijing was the the wealthiest
place in in China and all the other places for holes. No, no, no. It's the the the modernity
that and and the economic wealth that has become China is spread
across the country. They've they've gone from, you know, I think like 20 years
ago only 25% of the population would have been considered middle class. Well,
now that number is approaching 50%. That's incredible.
Just absolutely incredible. And so what does that mean? That means as they move up into the middle class, these people
become better. They start consuming more. Yeah. And there's a hell of a lot more of them
than there are in the United States. So things that in the past China produced to send to the West for the West to
consume will not be consumed domestically. And but but the fact that the Chinese
have achieved this level of technological expertise
again the the the the narrative in the west is the China just stolen everything. You know they haven't had an
original idea in their life. They're just copying off of us. Well no they're they're actually leaving
us in the dust. and the the number of areas in which they are leaders now.
They they continue to to overtake the West in every category. And and here in
the United States, we are so godamn arrogant that we we refuse to see our own decline
and we we've convinced ourselves that we're the best, we're the greatest, and nobody can ever change that. and all
these other people, you know, they're basically like dog feces. Some, you know, they wipe off the bottom of your
shoe. No respect for them. And China, Russia, and now India and
Iran, they're all looking around saying, "We don't need these guys.
It's a big world out there." the role of, you know, the central role that the
United States played in world affairs over the last, you know, 75 years, 80
years since the end of World War II. That's coming to an end because the
United States is no longer the economic and technological powerhouse that it once was.
It's slipping and I believe that that slippage is going to continue. It's uh
we don't we don't have the political will in this country to turn it around.
Too divided. Uh and and we're so easily distracted with these foreign military
adventures. So um you know I I the global south it it's
it's real. It's creating a new world and a world where no longer will the US
dollar be the the controlling interest.
Larry, you've mentioned the hatred toward Russia and Iran. If you were to compare the type or the texture of this
sort of mindset toward these countries, are they the same? Are they the somehow
the elements of the hatred are the same or it's not the hatred it's all about as
we know about the wars doctrine it's anybody who comes against the this
hegemony of the west would be the enemy of the west that's that's the concept it
doesn't matter if it's Iran Russia or eventually China yeah no the the the the hatred towards
those countries is different you know the the hate hatred of Iran stems in part from the fact that they uh in the
revolution they took over our embassy, held our people hostage for a year uh
with without the United States people under being taught or exposed to the fact that the US had played a role in
overthrowing the democratically elected government in Iran back in 1953.
Um and then the uh the Islamic element, the fact that they um you know we CIA
made a point of making sure that Americans always saw the Iranians in the street chanting death to America
and again not understanding the role that the United States played in provoking Iraq's invasion of Iran back
in 1980 and a war that killed millions, you know, close to I think two million
Iranians. So yeah, there there's a reason that Iran is angry with the United States,
but the United States has, you know, pictured Iran as this group of crazed
Muslim terrorists and and so that that that's how they define them. Russia is a whole
different, you know, cat. So it's now back, we can no longer accuse him of
being communist. And, you know, Putin alluded to this in one of his speeches. He says, "You know, used to think that
there was, you know, once we convinced America, the United States, that we're no longer communists
that we're good orthodox Christians, that they like us." And he realized,
"No, they still hate us. And they hate Russia because it is so big
and so wealthy. The vast natural resources that it
controls are are just uh no no other country can can match it. And then it
covers 11 time zones. The average human mind can't wrap themselves around that
even appreciate how how significant that is. So yeah, it's different different levels
of hatred. Larry, the backbone of Russia in the
fight they have against the west in Ukraine is the their
energy system, their energy network. And we know that from the articles in the
Wall Street Journal in Financial Times two days ago,
the Trump administration, while they're trying to pretend that they're negotiating with Russia, they're trying
to do everything to solve the problem, they're providing Ukraine with intelligence to hit the targets deep in
Russia. Right? These targets are basically related to the stability of Russia, to
the exports of Russia in terms of the oil and gas. They want to crush the
backbone of the Russian economy in their mind. Yeah. And and and they don't under again
they fail to understand the scale and scope, the depth, the
strategic depth of Russia. So, um I I picked up a number the other
day from uh someone in Russia that currently only 28%
of the refineries are operating. That's, you know, Russia has not turned on all
of its refining capability and and it's not all located over there along the border with Ukraine.
And yes, some of the damage to those refineries has caused some fuel
shortages in certain specific areas in Russia, but nothing
catastrophic. Meanwhile, most of the oil and gas
industry in Russia has nothing to do with refining oil. It's shipped out now.
It's shipped out in raw quantities. shipped out to India where India does the refining
to create gasoline and diesel. So, um, the actions though of the West,
of the United States, if if we flip the script, if Russia was
doing to the United States through a proxy, what the United States
has been doing to Russia through Ukraine, we would have attacked Russia. We would
have threatened them with a nuclear war. The Russians have shown incredible
patience in this and I you know it comes back to um they don't want to have this
erupt into a global war and um you know I think the general
staff is now pretty confident that they've got this this thing in hand and they're then they're going to they will
wipe wipe out the Ukrainian army. Uh just a matter of time. Uh but uh Putin's
trying to contain the conflict uh and and you know I hope to have some
discussions with some with a number of Russian political leaders and military leaders in the coming weeks
to find out exact you know I want to understand their thinking because you know they they've got more
they've got every reason in the world to strike back at us and I and I'm curious why they
Larry, you wrote an article on your website about Buris Johnson, you know, the bribe he got to to somehow
somehow to continue the conflict in Ukraine or somehow well the alleged let's let's be precise
the alleged bribe he just he got this this guy is friend of his just gave him
a million dollars. I mean, we're friends. Are you gonna give me some money?
Cheap skate. Sorry. Okay. Yeah.
It just Christopher Harborn is the guy's name who happen who happens to be a
weapons manufacturer does specializing in drones which are gee he gets a
multi-million dollar contractor to build him and send him to Ukraine.
He has no financial interest in wanting to influence the government. Of course not. He just gave Boris that money
because he because he likes fat white guys. But
sorry I interrupted. I I I think Larry, it's not just about
Boris Johnson. We have to think of Lindsey Graham in the United States.
These people are hugely hugely involved in anything any sort of aid going to
Ukraine. there. Well, let me say there there is an
investigation underway by the criminal division at the Department of Defense or now the
Department of War, the Pentagon, into uh the uh the the money that's been stolen
based on US aid, both financial and as well as military equipment. And again,
someone I know who's uh involved with that uh told me very, you know, a few
months ago that that at least 23 members of the US Congress, both in the House
and in the Senate, were involved in getting money and that two of those are Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer,
and that they've received multiple millions that have been funneled back. you know, they they find ways to to have
the the money moved into people's accounts without u raising immediate red
flags. So, I mean, this is this is corruption on a massive scale.
Yeah. Larry, the case of Venezuela, you said that you
don't know that woman who won the prize.
Jeez. No. Yeah. Yeah. She She's been apparently a tool of the CIA for years.
You know, this is boy, how corrupt are these Norwegians
and their so-called Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, this is really a joke. Uh you
could make a case that uh to give it to Trump, you know, he was desperate for
it. But what has this woman settled? The only thing she settled is trying to
provoke a a coup and over overthrow an existing
government. Yeah. We don't like the government. Yeah. There's socialist. Yeah. But, you know, so far
she was asking Israel to do Yeah. Yeah. She She can't Yeah. She gets
to She gets to be in charge. She can't wait to move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem.
Yeah. Just crazy stuff. So, you know, the the the CIA, man, it's like my old
my old outfit. It's like the uh Sauron from Lord of the Rings, you know, that
eye that never blinks, never sleeps, is constantly working to destroy and control.
Uh it's it's not out there to