Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Gates

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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ukra ... ic-arsenal

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LA Mayor RESPONDS After ANOTHER LOSS for Trump
MeidasTouch
Aug 2, 2025



Transcript

We just heard that the experiment from
the administration failed. The raids
that were happening in Los Angeles, the
random pulling and snatching people off
the street based on the language they
spoke, their appearance, where they
worked, the court has said can no longer
happen. They recognize that this was
unconstitutional, that it violated the
rule of law, and it has to stop. That
temporary restraining order has been in
place for a couple of weeks and there
has been peace in Los Angeles and I'm so
hopeful that now the fear will subside
and people will be able to come out of
their houses. So we got the decision on
a local level upheld by the 9inth
district court. We know it will be
eventually going to the Supreme Court,
but for now we've had a victory because
Los Angeles stood strong and we said you
experiment with us and it has failed.
Thank you for standing together, LA

[admin]

Trump Economy gets DEVASTATING REPORT
by Brett Meiselas
MeidasTouch
Aug 1, 2025



Transcript

Well, there it is. One of the worst jobs
reports that we have seen for the US
economy in a very, very, very long time.
And with downward revisions of the past
few months, all of that data that they
have been bragging about has been a
total lie. This is devastating, folks.
Let's dig in. So, in July, the United
States economy added just 73,000 jobs.
That was far below the expectations, and
the unemployment rose to 4.2%. I have my
doubts about that number as well, folks.
May and June payrolls were revised down
by 258,000
jobs, painting a very troubling picture
for the economy. And the revisions for
the past few months were absolutely
brutal. As you could see here, May
dropped from 144,000 jobs to just 19,000
jobs. June from 147,000 jobs to just
14,000 jobs. And if you take out healthc
care jobs from the mix, the US actually
lost jobs for three straight months,
down 53,000 in May, 45,000 in June, and
300 in July. The United States also lost
26,000 manufacturing jobs in May and
June, and 11,000 in July. That makes
this the worst three-month stretch for
the US economy since COVID in 2020 under
Donald Trump. And if you even remove
that COVID year of 2020, it's the worst
economic report since the Great
Recession. Just a few days ago, people
in Trump's administration were posting
things like this. Where are the experts
now? The Trump economy has officially
arrived. Biden's quarter is behind us.
Well, I guess the Trump economy has
arrived, folks. So, buckle up.

[admin]

[admin]

Trump’s Nuclear Ultimatum to Russia – Are We on the Brink of WW3?! | Scott Ritter
by Nima Rostami Alkhorshid
Dialogue Works
Aug 2, 2025



Transcript

[Trump] I'm not so interested in talking anymore. We have such
nice conversations, such respectful and nice conversations. And then people die the following night with a missile
going into a town and hitting, I mean recently I guess, the nursing home, but they hit other things. Whatever they hit
people die.

So Adam
Yeah. Here is what Medvedev have said, Scott on Twitter on X in respond to
Lindsey Graham. He said,

"It's not for you or Donald Trump to dictate when
to get at the peace table. Negotiations will end when all the objectives of our
military operation have been achieved. Work on America first."

And you see the
way that as time goes by, it seems that they sort of the momentum
that the United States had and I I believe they they still have it to break
a deal with Russia. They're losing. They're somehow the way that Donald Trump talking about Putin, the way that
Lindsey Graham is somehow driving driving the show behind the scene. Is the momentum
getting away from from the opportunity from what's going on between the United States and Russia.
There's never been an opportunity for Donald Trump to get his way with Russia ever. This was always um pie in the sky
thinking. There was a chance for the United States to put pressure on Ukraine to reality and to put pressure
on Europe to stop reinforcing stupidity. Um, and this could have brought about peace and Donald Trump would have gotten
a lot of credit for that peace, but the peace would have been 100% on terms dictated by Russia. Um, you know,
everybody needs to remember Russia didn't start this war. This war was thrust upon Russia by the collective, by
the United States, by Donald Trump, the policies of the first Trump administration. you know during that
time Russia was actively working to fulfill the promise and the potential of
the Minsk Accords. Um and it was the United States that you know continued to
send lethal weapons to Ukraine to train the Ukrainian army to NATO standards for
the sole purpose of confronting uh Russian separatists and Russian forces in the in the Dombas region. And you
know according to the pie sky thinking of the Ukrainian politicians and their CIA and MI6 uh you know masters Crimea
as well to push Russia to its 1991 frontiers. Um this you know Trump is to
blame here. He's the man who made this possible. Um the Russians were going to
cut slack. I mean, they I think the Russians were willing to go into temporary amnesia and pretend that
Donald Trump was the great peacemaker and not the, you know, the horrific war maker that he that he, you know, that he
is. The reality, the Russians know the reality. But Russia was never going to yield. They made that clear from the
start. go back to the initial meeting between Mark Rubio, Marco Rubio and Sergey Lavrov and Riad and they came out
saying well the Russians have you know given us reality and we need to yield to every but then they turned around and
said but now we need Russia to make some concessions and the Russians are like well what what part of um address root
cause of the conflict don't you understand we will make no concessions on that none zero there's no latitude
for this and there's no reason for you to hope that this will be this was known from the start. And yet Donald Trump
instead of exceeding to this reality and and you know telling his policy makers, let's find a a policy that meets this
reality, get this war over with now, he he continued to believe that he had some
sort of leverage over Russia, perhaps uh advised by Scott Bessent, the Secretary of Treasury, who believed that, you
know, he could break Russia's economy through sanctioning oil. uh Steve Kellogg who believed that they could
break Russia's military by continuing to flow weaponry into Ukraine. I mean these are some of the worst advisers in the
world giving the worst advice in the world to the dumbest president in the world about things Russia. Now he has Lindsey Graham you know whispering in
his ear as well. Donald Trump is a narcissistic egoomaniac. We have to remember that. And if it's it's it's has
to all be about Donald Trump. This is a man who viewed the Russian Ukrainian conflict not in terms of saving lives.
What a hypocrite. You know, he's providing the weaponry that not only kills Russian soldiers, but gets more
Ukrainian soldiers killed. He facilitates the continued flow of weaponry into Ukraine. That just
lengthens this war, complicates this war, but doesn't change the inevitable outcome. The man most responsible for
deaths in Ukraine today is Donald Trump. He could have brought this war to an end. You can't expect Russia in an
existential struggle. And this is indeed an existential struggle for Russia to,
you know, say, "Oh, we'll do what the United States wants us to do, even though the United States started this
war back in 2014 or even going back further." Russia has a long memory. They know exactly what's happening here. They
knows exactly what's at stake here. And they're not going to surrender to the United States, to the they're not going
to yield to Donald Trump. So, what we're seeing here is Donald Trump throwing a temper tantrum. Um, again, he's being
poorly advised. If he thinks for a second Russia gives one rat's ass about the threat of sanctions, he doesn't know
Russia, nor does he understand China, nor does he understand anybody else, any of the other players out there. Um, you
know, what we do know is as we speak, the Ukrainian government is at risk. Uh, the confidence in Vimir Zalinsky is
plummeting. And if reports coming out of the Russian intelligence service are true, uh there's meetings taking place
in Switzerland uh behind the back of Zalinski to, you know, to have him replaced with Zillusni um
who would just be another failed leader because again it doesn't recognize reality. Let me just tell you what the
reality for Ukraine is. Ukraine will be strategically defeated by Russia. The current government will not exist either
in the terms of the presidency or the construct of the Rada Ukrainian parliament. There will be new elections
and these elections will produce a pro-Russian government beholden to Russia that will seek to transform
Ukraine from the failed proxy of the West that it currently is into a member
of the Union state. Ukraine will become like Barus
a um you know a partner of Russia in the framework of what they call the union
state. It's not the Soviet Union. It's something different. But Ukraine will forever be attached to Russia to Belarus
to the east. It will never be part of Europe. That's the reality. The sooner Donald Trump recognizes this reality,
the better. But he's not going to. I mean, look, Tulsa Gabbard, God bless her soul, is out there, you know, doing
God's work about exposing uh, you know, the the scam of Russate, but, you know,
she's her she's had a deputy appointed uh, I think um, Aaron
I can't remember his last name. He's the nude number two at the ODNI at the Office of Director National
Intelligence. Um, Aaron Jacob maybe. Um, you know, but he he's a Russophobe.
Simply he's a CIA hack. Um, you know, he was a guy advising Trump about Russia in
the first term. You know, the guy giving the bad advice about how to arm Ukraine and all that. That's him. He's now the
number two guy. That there's not anybody advising Donald Trump right now who
knows the reality of Russia. They're all enemies of Russia. And as a result, he
continues to head to take us down a very dangerous path because you know all of
this russophobia, all this reinforcing the paranoia of Europe leads to situation that we experienced for
instance in Vboden a couple weeks ago where Christopher Donnie who the fourstar general who commands uh U US
forces in Europe and allied ground you know allied forces um sit there and
talked openly about how we could take out Keningrad the the Russian exclave. that used to be part of, you know,
former East Prussia, uh, the city of Keningrad and the surrounding areas. We
could take it out, he said very quickly. No, you can't. But if you tried, you die
instantly because gosh, let me remind everybody that Keningrad is part of the Russian Federation and the Constitution
of Russia deems it to be such and the nuclear doctrine of of Russia is such that anytime the the territorial
integrity or the sovereignty of Russia is threatened by nuclear armed powers that Russia will respond nuclear. So,
uh, Chris Donahue, the quickest way to die because you will be dead within, oh, I don't know, say an hour and a half of
making that decision is to order NATO forces to move on Kolenigrat. Uh, you will be hit by either a Russian nuke or
an archnik or something, but you'll be dead. So, we entire staff. So, the entire command and control structure of
NATO. Um, Kenigrad is Russia. It ain't your toy. It ain't a game. It ain't
soccer ball to be kicked around. Uh, and to threaten it. What in God's name do you think we would do if uh China or
Russia threatened Alaska or Hawaii or Texas or California? Kenrad is Russia. I
mean, these people are stupid. Truly stupid. But the dumbest one of all is Donald Trump. Let me make another prediction for you. He says he doesn't
want to talk to Vladimir Putin right now within 30 days he'll be making that phone call because his apology is about
ready to collapse like a house of cards.
You don't need to have some sort of empathy, sympathy to toward Russia. Just
put yourself in the shoes of Russians. You can understand that Russia cannot
afford losing Ukraine. And losing Ukraine, I mean that NATO puts the troops in Ukraine, puts the weapons in
Ukraine. Why is that so difficult for the presidents of the United States to
understand what is the main cause? What is the real
concern on the part of Russia? It's somehow it's so simple. But when it comes to the presidents of the United
States, somehow there are some barriers. There's some obstacles in in the way of in the way that they
think about Ukraine and the policies of Europe together with the United States
in Ukraine. No, Donald Trump understands fully well.
This is why he implemented the policies he did in his first term. He knows that the goal is to turn Ukraine into a NATO
fist that can strike upwards and threaten Moscow. Uh th threaten the
Russian strategic center. You know, people need to realize that the the Russian Federation
um is a successor to the Soviet Union in terms of Moscow and the defense of it.
Russia was the core element of that. the um the near abroad uh you know we call
the Baltics states uh you know Ukraine, Georgia etc. combined with the Warsaw
Pact. You know, when when Russia's strategic center was defined, it was during the Cold War when you had the
Warsaw Pack. So NATO was way the hell out there. You know, Poland was part of
the Warsaw Pack. East Germany was we're talking about NATO, you know, being on
the river Elb uh and even further. And suddenly NATO has progressed eastward.
People say, well, why does Russia object to NATO? because every expansion of NATO brought NATO capabilities that much
closer to Russia's strategic depth. And Ukraine is literally, if you carve
that out, you are just thrusting NATO straight into the stomach of of Russia.
Russia can't can't accept this. Can't accept this at all, especially given the hostile nature
that you know, the attitude, the posturing of NATO toward Russia. It just isn't going to happen. It's not going to
be allowed to happen. And yet, this is the policy that Trump was trying to implement during his first term. Trump
knows damn well what's at stake here. He's just playing stupid games. The Russians, I think, had hoped that Trump
would actually back away from the failed policies of the past and recognize that, you know, you can't have uh Ukraine and
NATO. And indeed, early on, you heard uh Trump administration people talk about that. But then they keep talking as if
Zullinsky is going to be the president or a Zolinsky like figure is going to be the president that Ukraine is going to
be this entity that still maintains its bandist uh connectivity um and has this
military linkage. I mean if you're not talking about the absolute demilitarization of Ukraine, what you
create is uh a NATO nation and everything but the legal um you know
stamp of approval. It's a a huge NATO army equipped with NATO weaponry capable
of striking Russia's strategic depth. Um, that's what Trump is wants. That's
what he wants. That's he knows what he wants because he helped design it in his first term. He was briefed by the CIA.
This is why they built 20 bases in Ukraine. He was briefed by the Pentagon. This is why they trained the Ukrainian
army. Trump knows what's at stake here. That's the hypocrisy of it all. The
Russians had hoped that he wouldn't. But what he does, what Trump does every day is exposes the fact that he's a lying
sack of cow manure who cannot be trusted at all by anybody. Um, especially the
Russians. I mean, and I and this pains me to say because we really do need to have better relations with this Russian
government. This Russian government is ready and willing to sit down and, you know, talk about a new way forward with
the United States, normalization of relations. But in order to do that, we have to stop this this this notion that
we can strategically defeat Russia or position ourselves to strategically defeat Russia. Russia will have nothing
to do with it. We wouldn't allow it. We wouldn't allow it. Would we allow, you
know, uh, China to come into Mexico and carve away Texas
right there with all the Chinese weapons ready to strike into the American strategic depth? Hell no, we wouldn't
allow that. Why in God's name do we think Russia is gonna allow NATO to make a move on Ukraine? It's just stupid.
Can the United States be great not having Russia and China as the enemy as
the enemy of the United States? Can we? Sure.
I mean fact is it's the only way the United States will be great. United
States will not be great by its military is destroying it. I mean this military is supposed to protect
United States is destroying the United States putting us into a state of bankruptcy. It alienates us with the
world. It causes us to behave in ways that um aren't conducive to a new multipolar reality. Uh and it puts us on
the track towards wars we can't afford to fight. Literally all this technological supremacy we brag about,
it costs money. And as we just proved with the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, we can't afford it. I mean, we we
ate up 25% of our THAAD um missile stocks.
Those are the missiles supposed to shoot down all the Russian missiles and the Chinese missiles if we ever go to war against Russia and China. We just use
25% of them to help defend Israel against not even Iran's, you know, B
team in terms of ballistic missile capability. our SM3 stocks. We haven't been
producing SM3s because we haven't been in a war like this, but they they're very expensive missiles and we just blew
through them. We can't build them very fast. Uh
the fact is any Pentagon planner, any Pentagon logistician will sit there and and should be advising people, we can't
sustain a highintensity conflict against a peer level force like Russia and China
for more than a week. And then we run out of everything. We run out of
everything. And that's the reality of it. We've built this hugely expensive military
that, you know, we we have enough money to goldplate it, but when the vine is
cut through, we're down to cardboard, baby, because that's all that's left. Um,
this is this is not the path to greatness. The path to greatness is normalization of relations, normal
economic, not this garbage that Trump just pulled off with the EU. The biggest scam ever. I mean, just think about it.
There's nothing about the deal real. Ursula Vanderland cannot commit Europe
to 600 billion in investment in America. So, it's a lie. There's nobody there up.
There's nobody there lining up to give America $600 billion. So, it's a lie. Straight up lie. isn't going to happen.
The 760 billion in energy, I mean,
we don't have that much energy to sell Europe, even if we wanted to. It's not how the system works. Um, and even if we
did, Europe's paying three to four times as much for this. In order to com to commit to $760
billion from the United States, they have to cut off, for instance, the the the gas they buy from Norway. It's not
just about delinking itself from Russia. I think what 23 billion dollars worth of petroleum products was sold last year.
Um but it means Norway that that there in order to commit to this you have to
stop buying cheap Norwegian gas and you have to buy this hugely expensive American gas. I mean, it might not cost
America much to produce it, but by the time we, you know, liquefy it, put it on ships, bring it over, dequify, get into
the system and all that stuff. Three to four times as much as the Norwegian
stuff. The Norwegian stuff's more expensive than the Russian stuff. And this is what Europe has signed up to.
It's not going to happen, by the way. We don't have 760 billion dollars worth of liquid natural gas products to sell to
uh to to Europe. And they couldn't buy it even if we did. It's a scam, a setup,
fake, fraud, a con. But this is America.
We can't be great doing this. I mean, my god, I'm not sympathetic. You know, the Europeans, they they b they built their
own ship. They shot the holes in the in the hole and it's sinking. That's on them. But I I hate to see people debase
themselves like this. I mean, as much as I despise her so of Vandereline, to watch her to watch her debase herself to
watch her debase herself in this fashion is is nobody wants to see that. What we'd like
to see is normal relations. And in fact, if we want to have normal healthy relations with Europe, we can't be
engaged in this sort of thing. Uh Europe needs to have trust in us. How how is
this a trustworthy partner? We're a colonial power overlording over Europe.
It's just it's it's it's sickening. Every aspect of how Donald Trump relates with our earthw friends and allies is
sickening. Sickening. It sickens me. We know that during the Biden
administration, Star was asking the Biden ad if you remember the that meeting between the Biden administration
and SM they were asking some sort of permission for some sort of permission
from the US government to attack Russia to hit deeper into the Russian soil. It
seems that even not having that sort of connection between the Trump administration and Europeans, they're
getting that from the Trump administration. When you look at the attack on nuclear bombers and Russia,
it's something it's it's not something small to be ignored. It's something big.
Russia is not just panicking. The way that Russia is behaving doesn't
diminish the importance of what has happened. Do you feel that we have some
sort of sanity in in the Pentagon? Because I see this problem coming from
Pentagon and the the sort of reports that they're giving the sort of information they're giving Donald Trump
because we had Pentagon going against Biden going and and deciding not to
escalate against Russia. But you don't see that role coming from Pete Hacket
and anybody from Pentagon. At least we can say that nothing is coming out but
some sort of propaganda about drones making new weapons and you don't see any
sort of strategic thinking or Pete Hexit putting out something more sane when it
comes to the war in Ukraine. Well, actually, HGset did. I mean, in the aftermath of the 12-day war between
Iran and Israel, HGET took a look at the expenditure of munitions and the draw down that's already taken place in
American stockpiles, and he said, "We're not sending anything else to Ukraine." He was overridden. The man who um who
seems to be in charge now is um Mike Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA. Um,
I mean there was a meeting where Donald Trump, you know, turned to to Radcliffe bypassing Hegsth and saying, "Hey, what
are we going to be able to get those weapons there?" And all I It's all a lie. Again, everything about Trump is a lie. 17, you know, uh, Patriot
batteries, the full compliment, they don't exist. But the point is, Radcliffe
took the lead on this, not um, not Hegsith. I I believe the Pentagon continues to be staffed with
professionals who, you know, their job is to, you know, lay out the reality of
of war. You know, this the the attack on Russian strategic bombers was a British affair run by British intelligence,
maybe backed by the CIA. The CIA is a rogue rogue entity right now. Absolutely rogue, out of control. Um, and I think
what Trump is doing right now is turning to the irony here, turning to uh Ratcliffe
into the Russia Russian mission center and saying, you know, turn up the screws. He he tends to forget it was the
Russian mission center that helped create the BS narrative that uh that was used to weaponize against him. Um, at
least aspects of it. I know there were some people who questioned some of the intelligence, but you know the the point
is I mean Trump is just confused. He's just a confused man right now. Um the
the the these drone attacks that are taking place in in in Russia right now, they're all
planned by the British. 100% planned by the British. Uh the Germans are facilitating with some technologies,
etc. But this is a British operation. And you have Trump meeting with the Brits, being briefed on by the Brits. He
understands what's going on. you know, he may now um decide to allow Ukraine to
use the attackums to a greater range. I think people should be reminded again
I can't speak for the Russian government nor would I ever be advising the Russian government on what to do but one you
know has to keep in mind that whennik was fired back in November it was a um it was a a
weapon system under development meaning that the the system that was fired was not a production missile. It was a
missile already undergone certain testing. It was ready for operational testing. Um but it was a missile that
had you know the booster taken from this missile, the second stage taken from this missile, the post boost vehicle
modified from this missile, you know, and then handmade um dispensing um you
know uh mechanisms and and and you know
purpose-built um you know submunitions. It was all
sort of a a pre-production um missile put together. They fired it
and it worked and at that point in time Putin signed off on it and said turn it into you know full-scale production. Now
Putin has announced that the arric is in serial production. That means that all those components that were used in the
arric um instead of you know being pulled one of and modified they now have
a production line. So, it's not just the Vodkin machine building plant that's assembling this. Um, it's, you know, a a
a propulsion center outside of Moscow. It's a, you know, uh, guidance center in
outside of Perm. It's, uh, you know, warhead center outside of Chilibens. They all have now production lines
dedicated to this. The entire system has come together and now it flows into Vodkins gets turned into a serially
produced missile which then gets turned over to the Russian military. The reason why I bring all this up is that
if the Russians decide to unleash the Archnik, it's not going to be one missile.
I mean, the Ukrainians are playing with fire here. And I think Putin has come out and said
just the other day that if
Europe or Germany participates directly or indirectly in an attack against
Russia, Ukraine will be the target of Russian retaliation.
So I think you will see the arric
brought in not in a single fire but we're talking about a sustained barrage
of arrestics that will just level Ukraine. That's the direction we're heading here. You know up until now
Russia's probably you know held back on that in hopes that Donald Trump would do the right thing. But if Trump is stupid
enough to allow attackums to be used, you know, this goes back to the situation that exists in the fall of
2024 when the Biden administration signed off on this very insanity. Um,
people should remember what the reality was at that time in November. Um, I
think it was Rear Admiral Radcliffe. Non Radcliffe is the CI director. I can't remember his name.
Butler, something like that. He's the the planning the plans guy for um
Buchanan, Rear Admiral Buchanan uh director of plans for strategic command
that's our nuclear armed forces and he gave a briefing to uh CSIS in um in
Washington DC where he answered some questions and basically he said that the
United States is prepared to engage in a nuclear exchange with Russia. that's
means a limited nuclear war with Russia. And he said we're prepared to win. Um he
said something else that maybe we the government should be more honest with the American people about what winning
means because he said if we have a nuclear exchange with Russia and we win, life will never be the same for
Americans ever again. Meaning the thing we call life that we all love, it'll be
totally different because we'll be living in a nuclear wasteland. No electricity, no food supplies, martial
law, no freedom, no nothing. That's the future for fighting a nuclear exchange with Russia. Now, people say, "Well,
that's just planning. I mean, he's just a planning." Well, except that it's not
just that because the Russians had said that if you if the Biden administration allows these long range attackum strikes
that the nuclear doctrine will be brought into play. and they published a new nuclear doctrine I think in late
November, early December. Um there was a briefing held at Congress. The CIA went around and briefed and the
I I ended up talking to a very senior Democrat who was president at this briefing. Um and I asked I said, "I know
you can't give away national secrets and I wouldn't ask you to, but the Wall Street Journal, Washington
Post, they all say that the CIA assessed that Russia was bluffing." I said, "Is that what the CIA said? Did they believe
that Russia was bluffing about the nukes? And this very senior Democrat said no. The CIA
said the exact opposite. Does not bluffing that if these attackms are used, Russia if the right if the wrong
targets are hit, Russia will use nuclear weapons against NATO. Um he said that's not the scary part. The scary part was
the Biden administration senior Biden administration people in the briefing saying we're ready for this. So
Buchanan's briefing wasn't just theoretical. Buchanan's briefing
was we're ready to go to war. And there were people saying there was a better than 50% chance we were going to have a
nuclear war at the end of last year. Better than 50% chance. The only thing that saved it was Donald Trump coming
out. He gave a Time magazine interview where he said, "If I'm president, I won't continue this attack him thing."
And that allowed the Russians to say, "Okay, we don't need to go into nuclear war right now. will wait for the next
for the new president to come in and he'll end the stupidity. We just have to ride this thing out. Russia's been
riding out stupidity like the Ukrainian drone attack against their strategic bombers. That should have brought about
an immediate nuclear response by doctrine. They attacked Russia's nuclear bombers. So, it should have been the end
of a lot. But the Russians are behaving responsibly. um they're behaving responsibly because
they're still holding out hope that Donald Trump will do the right thing and stop this insanity. But now Trump says
he doesn't want to talk to Putin. So my guess is that Trump is going to do
the dumbest thing possible and authorize the Ukrainians to use long range strike missiles. And they're going to do that
and then Russia is going to flatten Ukraine using arrnix. Then Donald Trump's going to make a panicked phone call to Vladimir Putin to try and stop
World War II. We were close to 50% over 50%. There's a
greater than 50% chance of a nuclear war last fall. Straight up. It's not exaggeration.
If Donald Trump allows long range strike, we're back to that level of stupidity. Better than 50% chance of
nuclear war. Do we really want to roll the dice? I mean, this is why you have to question
who's advising the president because I think Trump continues to believe that the Russians are bluffing because the
Russians have absorbed these attacks and just continue, you know, pressing home on a winning formula. But Russia can
only take so much and at some point in time when you cross a certain line, I mean, already you have these British
directed drones, you know, taking out critical infrastructure. Fortunately, it's, you know, it's a it's a
harassment, but it's not actually harming Russia in terms of their strategic economic capabilities. But if
the attackum starts coming in striking command and control centers, logistics centers, and things of that nature,
the gloves come off. And um I think you're going to see
destruction in in Ukraine like you've never seen before. And then the next thing the Russians will say is the next
strike is nuclear and it won't be limited to Ukraine. And that's when Trump will make the
phone call. So he can sit here and, you know, and sit there and say, "I'm I'm I'm really not feeling like a phone call
right now. Too bad, Donnie, baby." You know, the it ain't going to be Russia calling you, by the way. You know, it
isn't going to be Vladimir Putin say, "Please talk to me. Please." It's going to be Donald Trump sending a panic message. I need to talk to Putin now. We
need to end this war now. And Putin's going to say, "We end it the way we always said we're going to end it." And
this time, I think Donald Trump says yes. And we move forward. But what it it takes us to go right up to the edge of
the nuclear abyss to achieve this common sense, you know, solution to work it in
today, right now without playing nuclear, you know, um, roulette.

[admin]

Part 3 of 4  

Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper on the True History of Jeffrey Epstein and Ongoing Cover-Up
by Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper
Streamed live on Jul 17, 2025 The Tucker Carlson Show
[Lightly edited]

I'm going to summarize what I think you've said. We have no idea why Wexner gave him all this power and money. We have no idea. We don't have any hard evidence about it. Some people have suggested blackmail because of things that have come out about Epstein, but we don't have any evidence. There are people who were in the Wexner circle back in those days when Epstein was around, and they've claimed that Epstein was known around Wexner's office as the boyfriend, but that's just an allegation. Epstein was asked about it under oath, and he obviously denied that.

I'm trying to understand something that otherwise is really inexplicable. Because Epstein's annual operating budget would be hard to calculate, maintaining aircraft, a big yacht, etc., who are the other rich people he got money from? Do we know?

There was a story that actually just came out in the last few days that I have not had an opportunity to really dig down deep in. I should go check Mike Benz's Twitter feed. He's probably done this, or he will soon. But there are records, apparently, of a billion and a half dollars that were transferred to and from Epstein, apparently involving people whose names we've all heard before. They are not public. So I haven't dug deeply into that, but maybe there's one document that's going to tell us something. I mean, he's living the lifestyle of a guy who has billions and billions of dollars. But it doesn't explain motive. It doesn't explain why Wexner would give him all of this money at a very young age, with no relevant experience as a tax advisor, or an investor.

Think about this, Tucker. There was a point in the 1980s, and it might have been the early 90s, that Wexner owned Victoria's Secret. For a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, that's kind of a gold mine you're sitting on, right? Because he would go out and pose as a talent scout, and present credentials that made it plausible. And he would get girls who wanted to be models, who wanted to be in Victoria's Secret, to pose for him, and sometimes he would sexually assault them. So word got around that he was doing this, and two of the top executives at Victoria's Secret, guys who had worked there for years, and knew Wexner, they went to him together and presented the evidence, and told him that this is what this guy's doing. And they never heard anything more about it. Nothing happened. And so you ask, when two of your top executives come and say Epstein's using your name to sexually assault women who want to work for our company, and Wexner blows it off, who should get away with something like that?

And the answer is the kind of guy that Wexner would give full power of attorney over his estate to, I suppose. Its wild.

So there was a story revealed in the popular press of a couple of people who had relationships with Epstein, and gave him money. And one of them is a guy called Leon Black. So we know that Leon Black gave him over a hundred million dollars. I think he's admitted that he did, right?

Yeah. They all have the same story. They trusted this guy as an investment manager, basically, and turned out to be suckers. There's not a lot of billionaire suckers out there, when it comes to the money side of their life. I'm not completely firm on the details of he and Leon Black's relationship, but in general, he gives the same story that Wexner gave. "Oh, I trusted him. I was just too naive, and too trusting, and he scammed me." But they don't describe what the scam was. What's the scam? So if you look at what happened with Hoffenberg before Epstein turned on him, Epstein took a hundred million dollars out of Hoffenberg's company and accounts, moved it offshore, and then turned state's evidence on the guy, and he got sent off to prison. And what Hoffenberg said Epstein would do to other people, what eventually got done to him, is he would put their money into Towers Financial at the time, but he would set up other companies to do this as well, and he would get investors to come in, and then he would take their money and he would hide it away, and he would do it after he had procured blackmail on people to control them afterwards so that they didn't come after him. And this is something that I wouldn't probably put much stock in if Hoffenberg hadn't been interviewed about it in 2019 and told that story.

Steven Jude Hoffenberg (January 12, 1945 – August 2022) was an American businessman and fraudster. He was the founder, CEO, president, and chairman of Towers Financial Corporation, a debt collection agency, which was later discovered to be a Ponzi scheme. In 1993, he rescued the New York Post from bankruptcy, and briefly owned the paper. Towers Financial collapsed in 1993, and in 1995 Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to bilking investors out of $475 million. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison (serving 18 years), plus a $1 million fine and $463 million in restitution. The U.S. SEC considered his financial crimes to be "one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history".

-- Steven Hoffenberg, by Wikipedia

Nobody knows who Jeffrey Epstein was in 2002. He maybe was in the society pages in New York City or something, but he was not a celebrity. And Hoffenberg was making these very specific allegations about people that Epstein was connected with in the 80s and 90s, from Lease, and Khashoggi, to others. He gets down to exactly what he called the specific scheme that he was running called "Playing the Box." It's a way to scam wealthy people out of their money, using blackmail to make sure that they're afraid to come after him. But how much of his wealth that represented, it's kind of hard to say, because when he got sent off to jail in 2000, 2008, 2009, he moved all of his money offshore to Israel, and also sent 46-1/2 million dollars to the Wexner foundation, which Wexner says was him paying him back for the money he had stolen.

There are allegations that are pretty well substantiated by now, that one of the things Maxwell would do was act as essentially like a slush fund for Israeli intelligence black ops. And what he would do is reach into his company's pension funds, for example, and pull some money out so they could pull off an operation. And then six months or a year down the line, they figure out ways to get the money back to him.

Why didn't he press charges? Who knows?

So let's talk a little bit about what happened in that first case of his. Epstein was unknown to most people, and then he sort of becomes famous in 2006. He was pretty famous in society circles. West Palm beach is a small community of people who are very connected. How did he get busted? What was he accused of? What was he convicted of?

So Epstein's thing was that he started with Ghislaine Maxwell as his initial recruiter. She would find girls that were vulnerable in one way or another, like young girls, usually in high school, [middle school]. I think the youngest girl that he's accused of messing with was 12 years old at the time.

Maxwell would go out, and identify a girl who very often was from a broken family, or a family with no father in the picture, because fathers tend to beat the hell out of, and sexually assault, their daughters. And so she would find girls who already had some problems, and she would bring them in to give him a massage. Say, "Look, he's this wealthy guy. He really likes massages. He'll pay you $200 to give him a massage. Don't you want to make $200?"

Back in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, he gave a lot of money to high school girls from the wrong side of the tracks. I presume some said no, but others would do it. And once they found girls who kind of fit the profile, they outsourced the recruitment to those girls. They'd start out with the massage, and go from there. And the girls find themselves in this billionaire's house, isolated behind a gate, and what are they gonna do? It's a scary situation for a high school girl. I guess it's not strange when you really think about it, but when I talk to men about this, they're like, "Kill that guy. Get rid of that guy." When you talk to women about it, they're a little bit more punitive towards the girls, maybe thinking, "What was she doing there? I remember being 15 and I wasn't just some pure, innocent dove."

Men are protective of women, as they should be. And there was one girl who did refuse to do anything. And they said, "It's all right, it's all right. We still think you're awesome. We want to get massages and everything. I'll tell you what, you don't have to do anything, but we'll give you $200 for every one of your friends that you bring. If you find others, you bring them in to do this and we'll give them $200. And you'll get $200 every time you do it." And she did it. And these young girls were portrayed in the Press as prostitution solicitors. These are minors, high school girls being manipulated by adults who very skillfully manipulated them. So that's just a ridiculous idea to place responsibility on them. It's kind of a sick thing to write in a newspaper, honestly. And a girl who is from a broken family, and has some problems, from the wrong side of the tracks, she might know a girl who is from a middle class family, with two concerned parents, but very often her friends are from the same mold that she's from. Every once in a while there was a father, a mother who cared, and came from a pretty regular family. One girl, after everything was over, ran back to her parents and told them what happened, and they went to the police in West Palm Beach. This was down in Florida. The West Palm Beach Police Department starts looking into the guy, starts gathering more information, and talking to witnesses. And very quickly, this thing starts expanding out where two witnesses becomes four, and four becomes eight, and eight becomes 16. It's like expanding exponentially. And they're realizing they have a big, big, big issue on their hands.

When you're going through the Netflix documentary, it leaves out a lot of really important information, but in general, it's really good. They interview the Chief of Police in West Palm beach, and you can see he is flabbergasted. Outraged, to the point where he says that it cost him his faith in the U.S. Criminal justice system, because he was getting stonewalled at the local level. People in his department, or somewhere in the local government, were leaking information on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. So when they raided his house, all the computers had been taken away. He was totally prepared for it. Everything was removed. And they say he was 100% tipped off. So the Chief of Police is facing resistance at the local and state prosecutor level.

So he does something that you don't normally do as a chief of police. He went completely around his chain of command, and went directly to the Feds himself, because clearly the state and the local officials were too corrupt. Maybe it was just because Epstein's an important guy, and they don't want to rock the boat, and bring bad publicity to West Palm Beach. Whatever it was, he needed to bring the heavy artillery in. So he gives it over to the Feds, and that's when it ends up in the lap of Alex Acosta, who was the Southern District of Florida U.S. attorney at the time. So he starts looking into Epstein, and building out a case. A woman, A. Marie Villafaña, was the lead Prosecutor for the U.S. attorney's office on the Epstein case. And from all appearances at least, she was very enthusiastic and earnest about trying to pursue this case, and was very upset about how the whole thing was handled by her superiors.

A. Marie Villafaña

The lead federal prosecutor in the 2006-2008 U.S. investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, she repeatedly advocated for Epstein’s indictment on federal sex crimes charges and drafted a 60-count indictment, but was overruled by her superiors. She expressed frustration with the resulting plea deal, stating Epstein should have served 18 years, not 18 months. While some reports indicate she tried to uphold victims' rights and opposed work release, other records show she acquiesced to defense demands to keep the non-prosecution agreement secret from victims, which violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. She resigned from the Justice Department in August 2019 amid a federal probe into the handling of the case and transitioned to a legal role at the Department of Health and Human Services. Villafaña maintained she acted properly and criticized the lack of release of the full OPR report, citing institutional biases that undermined the case.

-- A. Marie Villafana, by Google AI

So West Palm Beach police department builds out a case, and they get to the point where there's 40 something underage witnesses on the record, telling the exact same story of how they were recruited, what happened when they got there, what they were asked and made to do, and everything else down the line, right? This is when the West Palm Beach Chief of Police first went to the Fed. Marie Villafana sort of chuckled and laughed, and said that this was going to be the easiest case she'd ever done. They were going to put this guy away for 100 years. So the Police Chief hands it over to the feds, and it's an open and shut case. I mean, how do you get away from 40 on the record corroborating independent witnesses, right? You can discredit one or two or ten, but you still got 30 left, you know. So he goes to the Feds, and they build out the case even more, they bring in more witnesses, gather more evidence. And all of a sudden, the prosecutor starts running into obstacles of her own. One of the things she found out was that the computers that had been taken out of Epstein's house in West Palm beach were in the possession of somebody connected to Epstein's lawyers. And so she put out a Department of justice subpoena demanding those computers from the lawyers. And the lawyers kind of delayed, had meetings, and put things off and so forth. People like Alan Dershowitz.

And so one day she goes to her boss and grills him a little bit, like, "What the hell is going on here?" She wrote this in an email, actually. She was very aggressive about it, saying, "I don't know what's happening here; I don't know what the deal is; but we have a child predator on our hands, and an open and shut case that should put this guy away for the rest of his life. What is the problem here?" And she gets reprimanded, and told in no uncertain terms that her attitude was not appreciated, and she needed to back off, and all these other things by her superior. And then one day, while the subpoenas were out for the computers, Alex Acosta personally goes in and cuts a deal with Epstein's lawyers without telling the lead prosecutor who's looking into the case, and without telling the victims, which is in contravention of victims rights law. You know, if you're going to cut a deal with a sex offender, you've got to tell the victims that this is happening, and why you're doing it. You have to tell them. It's a law. How did this guy wind up as Labor Secretary? That is a story worth looking into. I don't know. But there were a lot of candidates for the gig. Why that guy? So he comes in, and he cuts a deal with the lawyers that says, "Sorry, the federal government agrees not to prosecute Epstein for any of the crimes that are being alleged, any related crimes that have yet to be alleged, nor will they prosecute any of his accomplices, known or unknown." So crimes that come out in the future, committed by people who aren't known about yet, those are covered under this immunity as well. It's the most blanket non-prosecution agreement you can possibly imagine. And as a condition of the deal, the subpoena for his computers was dropped. So it sounds like they intentionally didn't gather a lot of evidence. So this is relevant.

The reason I'm bringing it up is this. I said I wouldn't talk about contemporary politics, but there's a huge controversy over why the DOJ isn't releasing all this information. And my informed understanding is, at least to some extent, it's because they don't have it. And they don't have it because it was never gathered. And I don't know why nobody has said that publicly. I'm not making excuses for anybody, by the way, but it's really interesting. So the cover up began immediately, 100 percent. And it went all the way up to the federal level. And then just to remind everybody where this conversation started, the U.S. attorney, Alex Acosta, future labor Secretary under Donald Trump, was apparently on the record telling the people who were vetting him for the Labor Secretary job that the reason he cut that deal was because he was told "Epstein belonged to Intelligence, and to leave it alone."

So let's just set this in time and place. The feds are basically Protecting Jeffrey Epstein in 2007-ish. That's the Bush administration. And clearly, this is a very high profile thing. It was in the papers. Acosta is the federal prosecutor in Southern District of Florida. Correct? So what does DOJ think of this? Are they involved in like the cover-up?

That's the interesting question. I go back to the question I asked earlier. A U.S. attorney is pretty high up. He's running the Southern District of Florida's U.S. attorney's office. There's not that many people above his head. You can tell him to drop a case like this. You got to think about it like this too. This is a career case for a prosecutor like Acosta. You're going to be Attorney General behind this case someday. Putting away a billionaire playboy for his entire life because he's sexually abusing underage girls for years and years, this will make your whole career. So there's only a couple of reasons that somebody like him would agree to do that. There are people whose names we've all heard probably, like Alberto Gonzalez, who was Attorney General at the time, it's only a few people who could do that. You have this billionaire who's the very definition of a flight risk. They don't take his passport away. And before he's sentenced, he flees the country, and goes to Israel, stays there for several months, moves all his money offshore, and while he's in Israel, he tells people that he's thinking about staying, because you can actually do that. They don't extradite Jewish criminals who flee to Israel. There's an organization called Jewish Community Watch, which is a Jewish organization that tracks pedophiles who have fled the United States to Israel, where there's no extradition of Jewish criminals there. And between just the years, I think it was 2010 when they started, when they opened up in 2016, 2017, when this story was written, so for a period of six years, there were already 60 pedophiles from the United States that had fled to Israel and were living freely there. Some of them had reoffended there and got thrown in Israeli jails.

So when Jeffrey Epstein was over there, why didn't the US Government demand that Israel send them back? I mean, you've been self-employed for a while, but when you weren't, was it your habit to go to your boss and make demands of them on a regular basis? I don't know. When do we ever make demands on Israel? But that's obviously distressing. So, there's clearly a cover up from the very beginning.

And I just want to say, one of the reasons we don't have this information now is because DOJ doesn't have the information.

Can I tie up that last point real quick? So him being in Israel, that may have played a role in him cutting his deal, because that's when his deal happens. He's already been charged at this point, he's awaiting sentencing, he's been convicted, and they don't take his passport. And he --

Wait. He's been convicted? He leaves the country?

Correct.

Let me back up. His plea deal was negotiated while he was out of the country because he didn't fight the charges. It didn't go to a jury trial or anything. He fled the country, and his lawyers could credibly go to the DOJ and ask for -- that is special treatment. Did any of the J6 defendants get that treatment? No, I don't think so. That's what's infuriating about all this. Leaving aside a lot of other elements that are upsetting, the most infuriating is just the multi tier system of justice. This is something that people do not understand, maybe even at the highest levels. When I read President Trump's truth socials about it, people don't seem to understand that this isn't about some guy that sexually assaulted a bunch of girls, because Jeffrey Epstein, for better or for worse, has become a proxy for other things.

Can I interrupt you to say that our faithful and gifted researcher has just held up a note saying that apparently Alex Acosta never said that Epstein was connected to intelligence. So that is not my understanding. He was asked about it at a press conference, and he essentially refused to answer. He said, "I wouldn't take those media reports at face value. And beyond that, Department of Justice policy kind of forbids me from going any further into that." And then there was an ABC News report that was talking about his DOJ deal back then. And they said that the DOJ had stated that he had no connections to intelligence. But when you actually read the documents, that's not what was asked at all. The question was not whether he had any connections to intelligence, the question was whether he was given leniency because of cooperation that he was giving to the FBI and DOJ on cases related to Bear Stearns. And they said no to that. And it got written up in the news as him saying he had no connection to the intelligence community, which is not true. The lies are overwhelming.

And just so everybody understands, there are over 40 on-the-record witnesses, most of them underage, corroborating each other's stories independently, of this guy sexually assaulting underage girls for years. He gets this non prosecution agreement with the federal government in perpetuity. "Him and all of his accomplices, known and unknown for crimes, known and unknown." Which gets sent down to the state level, and he agrees to a two year term down there in southern Florida. Not in a federal prison, not in a state prison, but at the county jail. It sounds like I'm making this up, but I'm not. He has his own wing of the jail to himself. His cell door remains open. He gets out on work release for 12 hours a day, six days a week. accompanied only by security whom he pays a salary. He only has to stay the night there six days a week, and then spend one day a week in the jail. So, it's like the National Guard.

Yeah.

And again, you're not talking about a guy who got busted embezzling funds. You're talking about a guy who got busted doing a crime that, if you were to poll every American, and ask them, "What is the worst thing that anybody can do?" It's molesting little children. Everybody agrees that that is the red line. Everybody feels that way.

So you ask, "What are the possible reasons that could be big enough, and important enough, that they would give a deal like this to a guy like this? It's insulting to the investigators, to the police, to the prosecutors to give this guy a deal like that. And can I say one thing that has always struck me about this case, and why I think it reveals the entire power structure in the United States? Public testimony from women who lived with Epstein talked of his contempt for Americans, sort of normal middle class, working class Americans. He did not see them as fully human. So molesting a high school girl from a housing development, or a trailer park in South Florida, doesn't really count as molesting, because who cares? And that attitude suffuses our leadership class. 100,000 people die of fentanyl ODs, and it's sad, but it's not an emergency because they're people you would never meet, and don't really care about. The people who are building the dollar store in their town, nobody cares about them. He really had that attitude. But that's the attitude they all have. He had justification for having that attitude in terms of the impunity with which he operated. And this is actually something I was hoping we would get to, because all this stuff is super intelligent, interesting, and important, all the deep, deep, deep detail on that stuff. I did a six hour long podcast series on it. And guys like Mike Benz and Ryan Dawson, who is one of the chief researchers who's done a lot of the work that writers crib this guy's research without crediting him, and I'm actually gonna interview him next week, just go really deep on a lot of the stuff that we're not able to get to tonight.

Jeffrey Epstein Client List, by Ryan Dawson: Page One
https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDawson109
https://sonar21.com/the-epstein-client-%20%20o-publish/
The Epstein Client List — Why is Trump Breaking His Promise to Publish?, by Larry C. Johnson, 9 July 2025

The question that I want to leave people with, as we get into the last part of this conversation, when Epstein was convicted in 2000, this was in the newspapers. If you were watching a football game, you might not have heard about it. But if you were a wealthy person in Washington D.C., or New York City, or West Palm Beach, Florida, you knew who Jeffrey Epstein was, and you know what happened to him, and you knew what he had done. His private plane was nicknamed the Lolita Express. [url=x]Lolita is a novel written by Nabokov, based on a true story, about a guy who kidnaps a 12 year old girl, and takes her on a kind of odyssey across the country, raping her over the course of two years. It's a novel about child molestation. And his airplane was nicknamed the Lolita Express.[/url] That nickname was given by other people. Other people knew who this guy was. They knew what he was doing. So a question that I really have been wrestling with for a long time relates to the point you were just making about our ruling class. If literally any one of my male friends or family members, any of them, were invited to go somewhere on some dude's plane, and when they walk onto that plane, as soon as they get in the air, five or six underage girls who are not related to them come out in their underwear and start offering massages, my responses to that are basically, what level of criminal action am I gonna take against this guy? Am I gonna beat him senseless? Am I gonna throw him out of this flying plane? Those are basically the range of outcomes for me in that situation. And that's true for almost everybody. Almost everybody watching this knows that. So when regular people hear about this, they have trouble believing that this is possible, because they don't know anybody who would have such a cavalier reaction. That's why I think it's important to cover this. And I don't want to get into the conspiracy theory side of this; that's not important to me, honestly. But we've been here now for 1 hour and 57 minutes, and I think I'm sort of familiar with the framework, and I don't think you've said anything that's speculative, have you?

I've tried not to.

So the story, based on available facts, which are a minority of all facts about it, but just what we have, it's a true indictment. You remember when the Podesta emails came out, and the whole Pizzagate thing took over the Internet for a while in every dark corner of Reddit and everywhere, which was this satanic pedophile conspiracy called Pizzagate. I'm not going to get into the conspiracy theory itself, but just use it to raise a larger point about what we're talking about here. The interesting thing to me about that whole saga was not the idea that there's some big crazy conspiracy involving whatever. That's what the Internet does with information like that. The interesting thing to me was the things that were just 100 percent fact, the bits and pieces of the story that they were using to construct that narrative, the pieces themselves are really interesting. One of the first things that came up from people digging into Reddit, and everywhere else, one of the things everybody remembers is hearing about spirit cooking, by the performance artist Marina Abramovic. She invited the Podestas to one of these events, and apparently they enjoyed the spirit cooking very much. And what, pray tell, is spirit cooking? Tucker?

It was a performance art piece, a dinner event, where the attendees would go and sit in rooms with white walls, and eat meals off of mock corpses in tubs of blood, with weird creepy messages about cutting the finger on your left hand, and eating the pain, and drinking fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk on earthquake nights. All these crazy edgelord art school, things that are just embarrassing, these weird cryptic sayings written in goat's blood on the walls. In one room, there's an effigy of an infant with a bucket of goats blood thrown all over it. There's another room where there's a bunch of shelves with little figures in various positions of copulation. There's photos from these events that Abramovich would put on. Lady Gaga's there eating off of one of these mock corpses. Gwen Stefani's at one of them. And this is a satanic ritual, but just forget about all that. Forget about all that. What if this was your friend, or your brother, your sister, and they brought you to this thing, you'd be like, "What are we doing here? What is this?"

And Tony and Heather Podesta went to this. Well, I don't know if Heather did or not, but he and John did. Tony's a big art collector.

No, I'm aware. I knew his wife.

And his art collection became a big part of the whole pizza gate. This is like right in my neighborhood, by the way, where I live. So weird. Tony Podesta's "taste" in art became a big part of that whole Pizzagate story. And it's one of those things that, again, when you have gaps to fill in a story, and just pieces of information, and you're not getting any explanations from anyone that make any sense, who are explaining it to you in a way that's plausible, that's how conspiracy theories grow like mold. If something like that is going on in your city, if some of the most powerful people in your city are participating in something like that, I don't need to know anymore. I literally don't need to know anymore.

viewtopic.php?f=219&t=3006&p=19234#p19231

Already in Mahayana Buddhism, the naked corpse of a woman was considered as the most provocative and effective meditation object an initiand could use to free himself from the net of Samsara. Inscribed in the iconography of her body were all the vanities of this world. For this reason, he who sank bowed over a decaying female body could achieve enlightenment in his current life. To increase the intensity of the macabre observation, it was usual in several Indian monastic orders to dismember the corpse. Ears, nose, hands, feet, and breasts were chopped off and the disfigured trunk became the object of contemplation. “In Buddhist context, the spectacle of the mutilated woman serves to display the power of the Buddha, the king of the Truth (Dharma) over Mara, the lord of the Realm of Desire.”, writes Elizabeth Wilson in a discussion of such practices, “By erasing the sexual messages conveyed by the bodies of attractive women through the horrific spectacle of mutilation, the superior power of the king of Dharma is made manifest to the citizens of the realm of desire.” (Wilson, 1995, p. 80).

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, by Victor and Victoria Trimondi

I told you earlier that I went and bought a copy of the Architectural Digest in Washington, and Life magazine, that profiled his apartment and his art collection. And on the walls in the photographs in these magazines, there's a lot of different art there, but the most prominent ones that are a mural size centerpiece of a room. The others are poster size. The big, important, prominent pieces that he's got out for everybody to see are by a Serbian artist named Biljana Djurdjevic. And they're part of a series of paintings that, according to the artist's own interviews, are based on explorations of child molestation, sexual assault, and just childhood trauma and abuse in general. And it is, you know. there are a lot of paintings in the series, but the ones that show up in the magazine piece, for example, the great big mural one is a bunch of young girls, that look like maybe teenagers, 12 year olds or something, who are lying in a circle. The name of the painting is called Synchronized Swimming. They are lying in a circle at the bottom of like a tiled room or something. And they all have this spaced out, kind of dead, drugged out look in their eyes, and some of them have black eyes, and they're just playing there. A

And so I don't want to be ruled by people like this. This just keeps getting so much worse. You're upsetting me, because I lived in this world for so long, and I intentionally ignored this. But now that you are describing it, I can't even believe I was in the same county as people like that. If I was into art that featured tied up pubescents, pre-pubescent children in their underwear by an artist that says this is all about child sexual assaults, if I was into that, I would at least take it down before company came over. These were rooms that he threw his parties in, he invited people over to. I would definitely take them down before architectural digest gets there. Being into something like that means that you are on an evil path. That's evil. I don't know what to say. Like an image like that. It's also obvious now that I have distance from it.

He was asked in an interview about some of his favorite artists. One of those listed was a woman named Patricia Piccinini who does sculptures, you could say, I don't know if they're clay sculptures, whatever, but they are really grotesque images of a small girl standing up on her bed, maybe five years old, with this demon thing with its claws around her, kind of leering at her There's one with this sort of weird pig monster spooning this little boy in his bed with pustules on its back. There's a lot of mouths that look like sphincters and vaginas, and the kids are playing with them. It's all very suggestive, weird, surrealist horror movie kind of sexually slanted stuff.
He listed her as one of his favorite artists.

Another one that he listed was a woman named Kim Noble. And I'll stop. Can I tell you that you're upsetting me. And because you're describing Tony Podesta, who is the brother of the former White House chief of staff, two time chief of staff, John Podesta, who is the most powerful Democratic lobbyist in Washington. This is not some fringe character. It's not a homeless guy, Not even some eccentric rich guy. This is a person who's at the center of the Democratic establishment for decades, for my whole life there. And his wife is, they've since divorced, but pull up a picture of those two on Google, and just look at it, and ask yourself, how brainwashed would you have to be not to see there's something really wrong there? Really wrong. Like deeply spiritually wrong? I'm not trying to be judgmental or cruel. I don't understand how that could exist at the very center of power in Washington D.C. I just feel it so deeply. This gets to the question that we're trying to answer here.

So another artist that he named is one of his favorites, a British woman named Kim Noble. And I don't think I could pull it up on my phone and show that to the audience right now without getting this video banned. Kim Noble was a woman who was violently, sexually assaulted countless times between the ages of 1 and 3. It shattered her mind. She has dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder. And several of these personalities are artists. And the art is something that a four or five year old would do. It's scribbled stick figures, the most grotesque depictions of adults sexually abusing children that you can think of. However bad you think it is, it's worse. And this was another woman that Tony Podesta said he was a fan of. So I just think to myself about this millionaire lobbyist in D.C. and his friends, the biggest Democratic lobbyist, saying, I'm a fan of the artist Kim Noble, and the image of the demon with his arms around the little girl feeling her while another demon urinates on her, is just fascinating in its use of color. Who are these people? So that's what I didn't understand.

I lived right down the road from Comet Pizza. I knew David Brock and James Elephantis, who are liberals, Democrats, whatever, and I'm not gonna have dinner with them. And I knew the Podestas. I assumed they were just douchey, pretentious townies. They made all this money. they're pretending to be sophisticated. They have terrible taste. This is like my snobbish thinking. I didn't, or couldn't, or refused to, or whatever, face the obvious reality that's just hitting me hard right now in the face. That's evil. That's just evil And what I thought was gauche is satanic, strictly speaking. Whether they're part of some organized Church of Satan, or whatever, I don't even know if that exists in real life. But certainly obedience to Satan exists, and that's what that is. There's a lot of people who have strange proclivities and weird interests. Fine. But he's at the center of the city. He's at the center of power. What is the culture of this place that he would feel comfortable inviting magazine photographers over to take photographs of the paintings he puts in his rooms by Biljana Djurdjevic that is unmistakably two dead little girls lying on their backs in a pond, or a lake or something. It's in the magazine And don't sue me, Heather Podesta, if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Heather Podesta told me to my face that they had another house just for the art. I think he supposedly owns 5,000 pieces of art or something. So why do you have a house? So you can invite people over. So they were like my neighbors. I never went, but I was never invited. But that means that a lot of people I know went over to the Podesta's house and saw paintings of demons having sex with dead children or whatever. I can't even put that into my head. And they're like, yeah, kind of far out, kind of funky, you know, sort of edgy. Tony Podesta should check yourself, dude. This is hell. And this is something that ordinary people really need to understand, because this is not the first ruling class that this has happened to. No, this is happening to ruling classes throughout the world, throughout history. This is Weimar, Caligula, yes. It's the British gentry in the late 18, early 1900s when, they're all into Aleister Crowley, and all that White mischief in Nairobi in 1925. This is late empire. So how is it that every single person I know would run screaming off of that airplane when six underage girls in their underwear come out? The answer is, if you just came from a spirit cooking dinner, followed up by a party at Tony Podesta's house where there's pictures of tied up dead 8-year-olds all over the wall, and then you go onto that plane -- I never went on the plane,. I never went to the Podesta's house, but boy, did I live in a world of people who did. And not one time in 35 years in D.C. did anybody say, "Holy shit, I was at Tony's house last night, and you should see what's in there." Instead, they were like, "Oh, it's douchey." I mean, you would get kicked off of a local school board for having pictures of tied up dead 8-year-olds on your wall. What's happening to your society? This is the seat of power. Its values flow downward. It's the top of the pyramid. "There's some freak down the block who's just into weird stuff, whatever." You might tell your kids to avoid that house and everything, but fine, this is America. We interpreted -- at least until Israel attacked Gaza -- we interpreted the First Amendment pretty broadly. Most people still do. Fine. I'm not calling for that guy's arrest or anything. He can go be a freak in his own house. But you're not participating in the conversation, or in the decision making process, of whether we do gender reassignment surgeries on 8-year-olds, when you have pictures of dead tied up 8-year-olds on your wall. And I think most ordinary people, and I think people who are in the Washington world and in a lot of these elite circles, they just don't get how this looks to the rest of the of the country.

And it's not just how it looks, it's how that kind of thinking allows you to kill a lot of people, which they do. And so they have these conversations about we need to do this or do that. What they really mean is drop bombs on kids, which they do continuously. And no one even mentions it. So the acceptance of violence against civilians, I've only started to realize this since I left. It's been five years. And maybe there's a circumstance where you need to go full Dresden on somebody. Let's talk about it. But they don't talk about it. It's just like, "Well, we're going to bomb the Houthis, and open the shipping lanes. What does that mean? Nobody cares, because they have a total acceptance of killing people.

One of the reasons I left the Department of Defense, you know, I used to work on air and ballistic missile defense systems for a long time with the DOD, and I would go all over the world, work with our allies, work on American bases, and travel on American ships being deployed to hot spots, so that they had a real expert, on in case something bad happened with one of their defense systems. And a lot of times I'd be on a little destroyer. And I don't think I'm divulging any classified information here or anything. And honestly, with something like this, I don't particularly care. I guess nobody ever told me not to talk about it. But when the Saudi war, and UAE war, on Yemen was going on, and every day you're reading in the paper of kids literally starving to death, of kids dying of very preventable, very treatable diseases by the tens of thousands on a regular basis, while we would be interdicting smugglers coming from Baluchistan and other places, trying to come in and out of Yemen, and we'd stop their Dows and small boats and board and search them and so forth. And when this was going on, I was a civilian Department of Defense employee. But I would go out on deck and kind of watch these things go down And I can't tell you how many times, eventually it was one too many times, I would read one of those stories about what was going on in Yemen, and then we're 100 miles off Yemen, stopping a boat that's coming into that country that has nothing on it but medicine, and then watching everybody dump it into the ocean, then everybody kind of celebrating like we just won another big victory, you know? And it got to the point where, again, it was just one too many times. I couldn't sleep at night. It was a big factor of why I left the job. And I want to be very clear. I don't indict the sailors who were carrying out the mission. When you're part of the military, it's hard to describe to outsiders, but these are guys who thought they were fulfilling their patriotic duty. I get it. But there's not a strong Christian vibe in that environment. Not exactly.

Yeah. It's not too welcome when you're asking people to throw medicine in the water that's on its way to a country where kids are dying of diarrhea. And that moral compromise, the answer to the question of how could Jeffrey Epstein get away with what he did, when everybody in elite circles knew what he had done? Why is anybody accepting an invitation to go hang out with Tony Podesta, or Jeffrey Epstein? Why is anybody flying on the Lolita express, or any of these things? I think we're talking about a moral environment that is very different from the one most of us live in.

There was an article in the New York Times several years ago about this French author named Gabriel Matzneff. There was one line in the article that really shed a lot of light on this for me. Gabriel Matzneff was a very famous French author, who had a column in Le Monde, I think. And all of his novels were about pedophilia, and painted in a very positive way. And the book that kind of broke through was called under 16 years old, and they're all graphic depictions of a pedophile. That was the name of the book. And eventually he gets busted, and when he's going through the criminal justice process, he doesn't deny anything that he gets really angry, saying, "I could name names right now that would bring this whole place down. Are you kidding me? And one of the things that they said in that New York Times story is that in France, this is common. This isn't unique to France.

[admin]

Part 1 of 3

John Mearsheimer: The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It
by Tucker Carlson
Premiered Jul 30, 2025 The Tucker Carlson Show

John Mearsheimer: What’s happening in Gaza is genocide. The United States should have nothing to do with it.



Transcript

An Update on the Ukraine/Russia War
Professor, thank you for doing this. The arc of and it's not the topic of today's conversation, but the arc of your career as someone who's just watched it pretty carefully all of these
years. You've wound up where I think all of us want to be, which is universally respected, regarded as an oracle. It must be sort of nice to look back and uh be vindicated. Uh so anyway,
so I'm honored to have you. Where are we in Ukraine right now? Well, we're in deep trouble if you mean the United States. That's rain.
[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] You talk about we uh the fact is that the Russians are winning the war. uh and there's no way that
Ukraine can rescue the situation. If you look at the balance of power uh in terms of weaponry and
in terms of manpower, the number of soldiers that each side has uh the Ukrainians are in
a hopeless situation. And furthermore, they're heavily dependent on the West for support. And
President Trump has made it clear that he's not going to refill the Biden pipeline uh once all
the weaponry in that pipeline runs out. So the Ukrainians are doomed. And if you look at what's
happening on the battlefield, it's quite clear that the Ukrainians understand that their defenses
are slowly but steadily collapsing. Now, one might say, well, can't we get a negotiated settlement?
Can't we bring this war to an end? And the fact is that neither the Ukrainians nor the West,
and here we're talking mainly about the Europeans, is willing to cut a deal that's acceptable to the
Russians. Uh so there's no way you're going to have a diplomatic settlement to this war.
It's going to be settled on the battlefield and the Russians are going to win an ugly victory
and you're going to have a frozen conflict. Why can't you have a negotiated settlement? Because
Russia has a set of demands. There are three main demands and I'll spell them out in a second, but
they are unacceptable to the Ukrainians. They're unacceptable to the West. Uh Donald Trump may find
them acceptable, but he's surrounded by people in his administration and uh certainly true in the
American foreign policy establishment who wouldn't accept those demands. And the big three demands
are number one uh that Ukraine has to be a neutral state. It cannot be a NATO and it cannot have a
security guarantee from the United States or from the west more generally. So it has to be neutral.
Second is that Ukraine cannot have a significant offensive military capability. Ukraine has to
be demilitarized to the point where it doesn't present a threat to Russia. And then third and
maybe most important of all, uh the Ukrainians and the West have to accept the fact that Russia has
annexed Crimea and those four oblass uh in eastern 1/5if of Ukraine that they now almost occupy.
So in other words, you're asking Ukraine to give up about 20% of its territory, and the Ukrainians
won't do that. And they won't agree not to be in NATO. Uh and they will not agree to disarm in
some meaningful way. So there's no way you get a settlement. So there will be a settlement by your
description because there will be a victory. So there will just be it's not an official settlement, but there will be a new status quo in which Russia controls a fifth of what
was Ukraine and that's just going to happen. So why wouldn't you want to get out of that with as
little destruction as possible? Well, you're going to get an armistice in all likelihood. And this is
why we say you'll have a a frozen conflict that will present all sorts of problems moving down
the road. I have long argued that the Ukrainians should cut a deal now. Uh because what's going to
happen is the Russians are going to end up taking more territory and the Russians have made it clear
that any territory they take they'll keep. Uh and furthermore, more Ukrainians are going to die the
longer the war goes on. So if you believe like I do and many people do that Ukraine is losing,
the smart thing to do is cut a deal now uh and minimize your losses both in terms of
territory and people killed on the battlefield. But you just can't sell that argument. And why
why can't you sell that argument? I think it's probably nationalism in the case of the
Ukrainians. The Ukrainians view the Russians as existential threat and they're willing to fight
and die in huge numbers. They're willing to make incredible sacrifices to do everything they can
to win this war and they just won't quit. And in terms of the West, it's easy for the West. So,
The West’s Ridiculous Russophobia
I just want to say I understand that and respect that person. I think they're wrong, but I I think it's self-defeating, but I certainly think it's honorable those impulses, but I don't understand
the West's stake in this. Exactly. Well, I don't believe the West has a strategic stake in this for
one second, but uh the Russophobia in the West is so powerful at this point in time that especially
among the elites uh in Europe and in the United States that getting them to concede that the
Russians have uh won this war or going to win this war is just unacceptable and have legitimate cons
security concerns on their border. order. I mean that they're not allowed. The Russians are not allowed to have legitimate security concerns in the minds of most Western elites. Why? I don't
know. It it befuddles me. Uh if you look at the Russian reaction to NATO expansion into Ukraine,
which I believe is the taproot of this war, it's analogous to America's Monroe Doctrine. The United
States under no circumstances would allow the Soviet Union to put missiles in Cuba or to locate
a naval base at Cen Fueos in Cuba. That was just unacceptable. This is what the Monroe doctrine
is all about. We'd never allow China to station military forces uh in Mexico or in Canada. Uh but
yet we think we have the right to move NATO far enough eastward to include Ukraine and then put
uh NATO assets including American military assets in Ukraine. And this is not of concern
to the Russians. They shouldn't care. Uh they should recognize that Ukraine has the right to
do whatever it wants. NATO has the right to expand wherever it wants and Russia has no say in the
matter. The Russians of course don't accept this uh because they have a Monroe doctrine of their
own. But we can't get it through our thick skulls that uh uh this is foolish thinking on our part
and is destined to lead to trouble as it has. It's it's interesting that the standard that US
foreign policy makers apply to Russia is different from a standard that apply to any other country
including China and even North Korea. They just they don't have the same level of emotion about
any other place. It's Russia, Ukraine. And I I find it baffling because on on some level this is,
as you said at the outset, this is not about America's strategic interest. We don't really have many there. This is about an almost overwhelming emotional response from our leadership class to
this conflict, to this region. I think it's weird. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think also at this
point in time, we have convinced ourselves, both the Europeans and the Americans, that Russia is a
mortal threat to dominate all of Europe. This is a ridiculous argument. Of course, do you think it is ridiculous? It's a ridiculous argument. As you have seen, the war started in 2022.
We're well over five years into this war and the Russians have had a very difficult time conquering
the eastern 15th of Ukraine. Just think about that. Over three plus years, they have been unable
to conquer all the territory in those four oblasts that they've enexed. Please tell me how this army
is going to overrun all of Ukraine, then overrun Eastern Europe, and then overrun Western Europe.
This is a laughable argument. Furthermore, if the Russians are foolish enough to try to occupy
western Ukraine, they're going to find themselves in uh a quagmire. They're going to find themselves
dealing with a huge amount of resistance from all of those ethnic Ukrainians in the western
part of Ukraine who hate Russians. This is why I don't think Putin is going to even try to conquer
the western half, much less Poland and Romania and the rest. Exactly. Their view on that, by the way,
in terms of occupying Eastern Europe, is we've been there, done that, and it did not work out very well. Remember, they occupied Eastern Europe roughly from 1945 to the early 1990s when they
pulled out after the Cold War ended. They had to invade Hungary in 56. They had to invade
Czechoslovakia in ' 68. They had to put down a major insurrection in in East Germany in 1953.
They almost went into Poland three times. They had their hands full dealing with the Romanians and
the Albanians and the Yugoslavs. I mean, the idea that a country like Russia is going to,
you know, invade and occupy and run the politics of countries in Eastern Europe is a remarkably
foolish idea. And again, they don't even have the military capability to do that. But that is
the idea. And when you talk to Europeans about it, as I often do, they say that Putin's aim is
to restore the Soviet Empire. And he said that and you know, just listen to what he says. He wants he
pines for the Soviet era and he wants to restore it. He's never said that. In fact, he said that,
you know, he can understand why someone in his or her heart pines for the Soviet Union, but in his
or her head it makes absolutely no sense. He said that uh the idea that you can recreate the Soviet
Union number one and then two recreate the Soviet Empire is a pipe dream and you might not like
Vladimir Putin but he is a very smart man. He is a first class strategist and he surely understands
that you know the idea of recreating the Soviet Union or the Soviet Empire makes no sense at all.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it is a cliche for a reason cuz it's pretty good advice. But
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wireless company. It's Pure Talk. You spent 10 years in the US military, graduated West Point
um during the Cold War. Yes. So your life for 10 years was focused on the Soviets, of course. No
question. No question. So that's 10 years. That's a long time in your young life. How were you able
to transition mentally from viewing Russia as an enemy to viewing them as, you know, another
country? It's an interesting question. Why weren't others able to do that? Well, a lot were, uh, but
a lot weren't. Uh I think uh that what happened was that during the cold war when I started to
think about the US Soviet competition the subject that I got interested in was the conventional
balance of forces in Europe. It was the NATO Warsaw packed balance and I wrote my dissertation
on the subject of conventional deterrence and it focused on the NATO Warsaw packed balance and my
argument was which was very controversial at the time was that the Soviets were not 10 ft
tall and actually if a war did break out in central Europe the West or NATO would do very
well that we would hold off the Soviets that they would not win a quick and decisive victory which
is the conventional was the conventional wisdom at the time. So in a very important way I was engaged
in threat deflation. I always thought when you looked at the Soviet Union this is during the
latter part of the cold war when I was coming of age that we greatly overestimated the threat
uh and that the Soviet Union was not 10 feet tall. So once the cold war ends and then we segue into
the unipolar moment, uh I'm already moving in that direction. And then during the 1990s,
the Soviet Union, which has become Russia, is a total basket case. I mean, it's the only threat
that it represents is to itself. Yes. Doesn't represent a threat to the West. And in fact,
Tucker, NATO expansion, which really gets going in 1994, that's when Bill Clinton decides to expand
NATO, is not designed to contain Russia because there is no Russian threat. So then Putin comes to
power. And what happens from about 2000 up until the present is that the West uh and here we're
talking about the United States as well of course uh becomes increasingly russophobic and hostile
to Putin. And I think it's in large part because Putin stands up to us. Uh I think that we get used
to the idea certainly in the 1990s that we call the shots. It's the unipolar moment. And when we
tell countries to jump, their only question is how high. And we get away with that uh to some extent
with Putin to begin with. But then he begins to play hard ball with us. And he gives a very famous
speech in Munich in 2007 where he throws down the gauntlet. And from 2007 forward, uh relations
really deteriorate. And as they deteriorate, the Russophobia comes racing to the four
uh and remains firmly in place today. What what is the point of NATO now? Like why do we still
Why Do We Still Have NATO?
have NATO? What's its objective? Well, I think if you asked most Europeans and even many Americans
in the American foreign policy establishment, the argument would be that NATO serves as a pacifier.
Uh in other words, it keeps the peace in Europe. Uh the United States is the most powerful state
in NATO and the United States sits on top of all the European countries. It provides security for
them. It provides a nuclear umbrella for them and that prevents the European countries from
engaging in security competition with each other. So we are a pacifying force and this
is the reason that the Europeans today to prevent intrauropean conflict. Intra European conflict.
Right. Interesting. Well, if you think about it, uh up until uh 1945 when World War II ends,
you would had two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. And then if you go back in time, European countries had been fighting against each other uh almost since the beginning of time. Well,
that's why there are so many European countries and so many languages and different distinct cultures. I mean, you might also make the argument that's why Europe was so successful because they
were You can certainly make that argument and you can make the argument that that's why they were able to conquer uh huge chunks of the planet and create these empires because they were very good
at projecting military power. These were Marshall societies before they became tourist destinations.
Yes. But but anyway, what happens during the Cold War is the Soviets dominate one side of Europe and
we dominate the other side of Europe. And as long as those two great powers are dominating those
two halves of Europe, the countries located below them cannot fight among themselves. Okay? So what
happens when the Cold War ends in 1989 and then into the 1990s is that we decide that we're going
to expand NATO eastward. And as I said to you, it's very important to understand that when we
expand NATO eastward in the '9s and then the early 2000s, we're not aiming at containing Russia.
What we're interested in do is doing is taking the pacifier, the American pacifier that sits over
Western Europe and putting it over Eastern Europe and making Europe one giant zone of peace. And the
Europeans liked that idea. You want to remember after 1989 lots of Europeans were very worried
about Germany which reunified when the cold war ended. And you can understand why Europeans were
very nervous. Yes. But as long as the Americans stay in Europe, as long as NATO remains intact,
the pacifier is there. You know, most people don't realize this, but the Soviets and then
the Russians were perfectly content to see the United States remain in Europe and for NATO to
remain intact after the Cold War because the Soviets/Russians understood that we served as
a pacifier. What they didn't want, and they made this very clear, was NATO expansion. And of course
what we did starting in 1994 was to expand NATO eastward again to move the pacifier from over just
Western Europe to over all of Europe. And that is what that is what has produced the catastrophe in
Ukraine. By the time NATO gets to the Baltics and then we start talking openly, as the Biden administration did, just openly, like at press conferences, about moving NATO into Ukraine,
it's very obvious that that's going to trigger a conflict with Russia at some point. You know, how could it not? Why didn't anyone pause and say, "Okay, NATO's great. Obviously,
there's a massive budget. We're all getting richer from NATO also." But is it let's
balance that against like a war with Russia. We don't want that. Did anyone raise that point?
Couple points just to get the dates right. Uh the second big trunch of NATO expansion which brings
the Baltic states in is 2004. Yep. The first big trunch is 1999. That's Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic. 99. Then 2004 is when the Baltic states come in. 2008 is when the critical decision
is made. April 2008 to bring Ukraine into NATO. Okay. But to get to the heart of your question,
what's very interesting is if you go back and look at many of the planning documents from the
'9s about NATO expansion, people recognize at the time that Ukraine is a special case and it
will be a huge source of trouble if we move NATO into Ukraine. So you can get away with Poland. You
can even get away with the Baltic states, but Ukraine is a different matter. And it's very important to understand that we understood that from the get-go. So the question then becomes what
you're asking is why did we do it, right? What's going on here? Why didn't we just back off? And I
think the answer is we thought we could shove it down their throat. You want to understand,
they opposed the 99 expansion, the first trunch. We just shoved it down their throat. Yeah. What's
Boris Yelson going to do about it? That's right. That's exactly right. What's he going to do about it? And then 2004, Putin's in control now. We shove it down their face down their throat again.
So in 2008, immediately after NATO says at the Bucharest, April 2008 NATO Bucharest summit,
immediately after he says that NATO says that uh Ukraine will be brought into NATO,
Putin makes it manifestly clear that this is unacceptable, that this is an existential threat
and that Russia will not let it happen. And by the way, at that April 2008 NATO summit, they said
they were not only going to bring Ukraine into NATO, they're going to bring Georgia into NATO.
That's April 2008. A war breaks out in Georgia in August of 2008 over this very issue. So, you would
expect us to back off at that point, but we don't back off. In fact, we double down. And then when
the crisis first starts, this is in 2014, February 22nd, 2014. That's when the crisis starts. That's
when the Russians take Crimea. This is when you understand or should understand the Russians mean
business. Do we back off? Do we try to accommodate the Russians in any way? Absolutely not. We plow
forward and then of course we get the war in 2022. And you ask yourself, why did we do this? And
by the way, if you look at the process, uh, the decision-making process after Joe Biden moves into
the White House in January 2021, January 2021, and then 13 months later, the war breaks out,
Biden makes no effort whatsoever to accommodate the Russians. So again, the question is why?
What's going on here? Yes, we're just going to shove it down their throat. We think we're
Godzilla. We think it's still the unipolar moment. We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe
country. Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia. Yeah, good luck. So, most people when they think
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today. Burna.com. But why would you want to? Even if you have absolute power, which of course
doesn't exist, but let's say you believed you had it. Why would you want to do that? I believe that once the decision is made in 2008 that you're going to bring NATO to Ukraine, you're
going to bring Ukraine into the alliance. That the idea of backing off is unacceptable to the United
States and to the West. You just don't do that. That would be a sign of weakness and we cannot
show weakness. And I think a lot of this thinking has to do with why we won't quit. Now, one should
say to him or herself at this point, it's time to put an end to this war and accept the fact that
the Russians have won an ugly victory. But we can't bring ourselves to do that. That would be
showing weakness. So instead, we continue to plow on. But in, you know, attempting to show strength,
The Growing Threat of China and How the US Empowered Them
we reveal weakness. I mean, that's my concern is, you know, once you project force and it doesn't
work, then you're revealed to the world is weak. The limits of your power are obvious to everybody.
It's better to to threaten and have, you know, your true power concealed. People can guess at what you can do. But now there's no guessing. We couldn't be Russia. And that's correct. Right. So,
we lost a war to Russia. It's a proxy war, but it was a war. And so, what does that mean?
Well, it is uh you know a devastating defeat for NATO because we have invested so much in
this war. Right. Uh the other problem that we face is that the United States and this is true of both
the Biden and Trump administration consider China to be the principal threat to the United States.
China is a pure competitor. Russia is not a pure competitor. Russia is not a threat to dominate
Europe. Russia is not the Soviet Union. China is a peer competitor. It's a threat to dominate
Asia. And what we've been trying to do since 2011 when Hillary Clinton announced it when she was
Secretary of State is we've been trying to pivot to Asia. Uh but what's happened here is we've got
bogged down in Ukraine and now we're bogged down in the Middle East. And this makes it difficult
to fully pivot to Asia. And this is not in the American national interest. But to make matters
even worse, what we have done is we have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. Yes. If
you think about it, we live in a world where there are three great powers. The United States, China, and Russia. If the United States views China as its principal competitor and the United States
is interested in containing China in East Asia, it would make eminently good sense to have Russia on
its side of the equation. Instead, what we've done with the Ukraine war is we've driven the Russians
and the army, the Russians and the Chinese closer together. So that's so obvious even to
me a non-speist just like it's obvious just look at a map that it had to have been obvious to the
previous administration but they did it anyway. So you have to kind of wonder did they want that.
I think you're underestimating uh how much strategic sense the American foreign policy
establishment has. So they're just so incompetent they didn't see that coming. Yes. I mean,
I'll take it a step further. I mean, come on. Let's talk about China. This is an even bigger
issue. The Cold War ends and as you well remember, at the end of the Cold War, China and the United
States were basically allied together against the Soviet Union. Of course, that was the whole point.
Yeah. Right. So the Soviet Union uh cold war ends, Soviet Union disappears and there's no longer any
need for us to have a close relationship with China. We don't need them to help contain the
Soviet Union. So the question is what do we do with the Chinese moving forward? And economically
China is a backwards country in the early 1990s. What we do is we adopt a policy of engagement
with China. Engagement is explicitly designed to turn China into a very wealthy country. This is a
country that has over four times the population of the United States and you're talking about
making it very rich. For a realist like me, this is lunacy. you are in effect creating a peer
competitor. In fact, you may be creating a country that is more powerful than the United States. But
the foreign policy establishment in the United States almost to a person including hawks like big
new Brjinski and Henry Kissinger said that China can grow economically. we can integrate it into
institutions like the World Trade Organization and so forth and so on and it will become a democracy
and we will all live happily ever after. Right? So what we did is that we helped fuel China's
phenomenal growth between 1990 and 2017 when it became a great power. You want to remember
that when the Cold War ends and then the Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991, we enter the
unipolar moment, which by definition means there's one great power on the planet. Yeah, that's the
United States of America. By 2017, there are three great powers on the planet. And one of those three
great powers is a peer competitor. And we helped create that peer competitor on the foolish belief
that if we turned China into a rich country, it would become a liberal democracy and it would
become a friend of the United States and it would allow us to run international politics the way
we did during unipolarity. This is a remarkably catastrophic decision. It must be strange for you
having spent your life in this one field um both in the military effectively and then in academia
and you've had tenure at Chicago since ' 82. Is that right? I went to Chicago in ' 82. I got
tenure in 1987. So you've been there over 40 years working on this suite of topics, this group of
topics. When you look around and everybody, even the most famous people in your field are buying
into something that stupid, how does that make you feel? Bjinsky and Kissinger are saying things
that are just like obviously dumb. That must be weird. It's very weird. I remember I debated
uh in the early 2000s at Carnegie in Washington DC uh on whether China could rise peacefully.
And there's actually a big story in foreign policy the magazine that has an abbreviated
transcript of our debate. And uh I remember Zigg was arguing that China can rise peacefully and I
was arguing that China could not rise peacefully and that our policy of engagement was foolish. And
as he was speaking and I was sitting on the dis I was saying to myself, I don't get what's going on
here. Spignjinski, who's about 10 notches to the right of me on almost all foreign policy issues,
shouldn't be making this argument, but he's making this argument. Yes. And I'm the one who looks
like a super hawk. Uh when at the end of the cold war, I was more uh on the dovish side arguing the
Soviets were not 10 feet tall. And of course, Big was always arguing the Soviets were 10 feet tall.
So, it was really perplexing. And throughout the '9s and throughout the early 2000s when I argued
China could not rise peacefully. Uh I could not get a hearing in the United States. People just
didn't take me seriously. They'd say John's a very smart guy. He's very entertaining. He's amusing,
but he's basically crazy when it comes to China. That was the view. Now, of course, I think everybody understands that I was basically right and they were wrong. And your identity is
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it's too late. identity.com/ducker. It's just but there hasn't I mean if you had a field just pick
some other field structural engineering and if you had America's sort of corpus of structural
engineers you know they all sort of know each other the eminent ones are friends and all the bridges they built started to fall down there would be an immediate reorganization of the
field you would say this just what you know you don't know what you're doing look look at the results I don't understand how you could have this many decades of backto-back foreign policy
disasters and not have a wholesale reorganization of like the brain trust. I agree. Let me just
tell let me I I let me just tell you one other story. Let's go back to the 1990s. Talk about
NATO expansion. As I said to you, the Clinton administration made the decision in 94. One might
think that there was overwhelming support for NATO expansion in the foreign policy establishment.
There actually was not. Bill Perry, who was Clinton's Secretary of Defense, was adamantly
opposed to any NATO expansion and thought about resigning as Secretary of Defense over the issue.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was opposed. Jean Kirkpatre, Paul Nitsa, George Kennan, there's a
laundry list of prominent people who were opposed to NATO expansion. Anyway, the decision is made
in '94. The first tranch is in 1999. And then the opposition disappears. There's no more opposition.
Disappears. Disappears. And as this situation regarding NATO expansion deteriorates over time,
especially once the decision is made to bring Ukraine into NATO, you would think that we
would begin to do an about face that more and more people would begin to appear who make the
argument that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a bad idea. Again, in the 1990s, people were making that
argument. But that doesn't happen at all. And I become in many ways the principal person who
argues that we're responsible for the 2014 crisis. I wrote a piece in foreign affairs after the
crisis broke out in February of 2014. But there are remarkably few people who are questioning
whether further uh pushing down the road to bring Ukraine into NATO makes sense. Right. No,
they're doubling down. They're doubling down. And then you're getting people at the Atlantic Council say, you know, well, I guess we have to use nukes now. I mean, you see people get not just refuse to
reflect or repent, but become like actively crazy. Just crazy. Like, no tactical nukes. I mean,
you know, we're not going to win without them. People are saying that, as you know. What is that?
Well, it will be a devastating blow for us to lose the war in Ukraine. And when foreign policy elites
get desperate, they do reckless things or they talk in reckless ways. Right. Right. This is why,
by the way, the Ukraine war uh even once it's settled and becomes a frozen conflict will be
so dangerous. Right. Because it the fact that it is a defeat for the West and that we have been
humiliated uh and that we lost this major war that we were so deeply committed to will give people
incentives to try to reverse the tide to rescue the situation. And when people are desperate, they
sometimes pursue very risky strategies. So once this war becomes a frozen conflict, we're going to
have to worry about it reescalating. It seems very easy for um you know a reckless government in Kiev
to provoke Moscow basically. I mean you've seen it you know sending drone swarms onto air bases or in
you know setting the Kremlin on fire which they did and got no publicity but they have done that.
It's just it's it's this weird asymmetrical arrangement where they Ukraine actually has
quite a bit of power to stoke a global conflict and incentive to do it, don't they? Mhm. That's
exactly right. What they want to do is they want to see the war escalate because they want to bring
us in. If if the Ukrainians have any hope of rescuing the situation, it's to bring NATO into
the fight. Exactly. Actually doing the fighting. Uh and uh we've seen this in other regions. It's
it's a bad idea to get allow other countries an incentive to suck in the United States because
they will. Yeah. Well, I mean, you see this with the Israelis in Iran, right? In 2024, the Israelis
tried to bait us into the war into a war against Iran on two separate occasions. And the Biden
administration, much to its credit, did not uh take the bait. But Donald Trump did take the bait,
right? The Israelis have long had a deep-seated interest in getting us uh involved against Iran
because they understand they can't defeat Iran by themselves and they can do it uh they think with
us. Uh so this is analogous to the situation with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainians, as you said,
have a deep-seated interest in getting us into the fight. So, as long as we're tied to Ukraine,
The US Puppet Called Zelensky
um, if there's an implicit security guarantee, which there kind of is at this point, I mean,
there has been, why don't we have an interest in like controlling the government of Ukraine? So,
you can't, in other words, why do we have Zilinski running Ukraine, this unelected lunatic running Ukraine, when we have skin in the game? Like, why why do we allow that? Well,
we've been content with Zilinski up to now. Uh and the Europeans love Silinski. Why? Because
he's committed to continuing the war and uh he is very good at public relations in the West. Uh he
has excellent advisers. He's a former actor. He knows how to play the game. Uh so he's good at
dealing with the West and uh and he does what we want. I mean, it's not like he's doing things that
we don't want him to do. No, that's right. uh he he he is our man and once he ceases to be our man,
we'll go to great lengths to put somebody else in his place. But both Europe and the United States have become poorer and weaker during the course of the Ukraine war, partly as a
result of the Ukraine war. So I don't really see how we're winning. How is the US benefiting from
this? How is how is Western Europe benefiting from this? Well, I think that uh it's Europe,
Western Europe in particular, that's been hurt economically by this war, not so much us. And
one could argue that we've uh we've benefited on the margins at the expense of the Europeans. Well,
the US dollar kind of is I mean it's no it's obviously not a safe haven anymore. So I mean
it's just a matter of time I would say. Well the question is how much of that is due to the Ukraine war versus other American policies. I'm sure that there are a million factors, but kicking
Russia out of Swift, just stealing the personal property of the so-called oligarchs, behavior,
lawless, crazy behavior like that sends a message to the world that like don't keep your wealth and
dollars because it can become an instrument of war. I mean, that's my view on it anyway. Yeah,
there's no question about that. Yeah, there's no question about that. that uh but we the
problem is that we're now so deeply committed that we we just can't turn the ship around.

[admin]

Part 2 of 3

Do Donald Trump’s Biggest Challenges With Ending the War
we have any leverage at all left? I notice the administration is threatening today that in 12
days we're going to do something with sanctions then secondary sanctions against China and India
if they buy Russian oil. I mean is that any of that meaningful? I don't think secondary
the threat of secondary sanctions is meaningful. I mean, the economic consequences for the world and
for the United States would be disastrous if they actually were put into effect and worked. Uh I
think the Chinese and Indians would just blow them off at this point. So, I don't think that they'll
work. We have no cards to play. If we had cards to play, Biden would have played those cards. I mean,
one fundamental difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden was fully committed to
the war and wanted to do everything he could to make sure the United States stayed in the game
uh and continued to support uh Ukraine no matter what. Trump definitely wanted to end the war. He's
been unsuccessful. He really doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know how to end the war, but he does want to end it. Uh, and the question you really have to ask yourself is what is
he going to put into the pipeline, the Biden pipeline, once the weaponry dries up? Uh, and,
uh, I don't think that Trump is going to end up giving the Ukrainians a lot more weaponry. Uh,
so I think he's going to basically allow the Ukrainians to be defeated on the battlefield. This
is going to be a huge problem for Trump because he's going to be blamed for losing Ukraine. The
problem that Trump runs into is the same problem that Biden ran into with Afghanistan. Remember,
Trump was the one who wisely decided we're getting out of Afghanistan. Yes, he was smart to do that.
But it was Biden who actually took us out of Afghanistan and that was a disaster. And he got
all sorts of mud spilled on him uh for taking us out of Afghanistan. Well, what's going to happen
in Ukraine at some point is the Russians are going to win and Trump is going to get blamed for that. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that Trump is so hesitant uh on Ukraine is not
simply because he's surrounded by advisers who are super hawks on Ukraine and want to hang on to the
bitter end. It's also because Trump understands that when Ukraine uh loses, it will be seen
as having happened on his watch. No question. Yeah. No question. He he doesn't want that to
happen. This is why Trump was deeply committed to negotiating a settlement. Why couldn't Why didn't
that work? It didn't work because Trump would have to accept Russia's three key demands that
I spelled out to you at the start of the show. And those three key demands are unacceptable
to almost every person in the American foreign policy establishment and almost every uh foreign
policy elite in Europe. Trump is an outlier on the whole issue of Ukraine. He JD Vance and a handful
of other people and they're not in a position to bite the bullet and say we will accept the main
Russian demands and go from there. And by the way, even if they do accept the main Russian demands,
uh the fact is that uh there will be huge resistance from the foreign policy establishments
on both sides of the Atlantic. So sometimes when people sell products on TV, I love this product,
I use this product, there's the question in the mind of the viewer, does this guy really use the product? Does he really love the product? Would he keep the product at home? Ask my dogs. Yes. Now,
we are in a garage. Uh, I'm not going to tell you where it is because again, this is prepping, but
this is my garage. There's a gun safe. And this is a part of my stockpile of ready hour. Completely
real. The second I put it here, the second Ready Hour sent it to me, I felt peace of mind. Um,
because no matter what happens, we're not going hungry in my house. I moved a lot of fishing gear out of the way to keep it in my garage. And ever since it's been here, I have felt the peace
of mind that comes from knowing my family's not going hungry no matter what. Lastount supply.com.
Lastountupupply.com. It can be in your garage along with the peace of mind that comes with having it. Well, I can't think of a group I'm less interested in listening to than the foreign policy
establishment. I mean, again, that just seems so totally discredited. It's like dating tips from
Jeffrey Epstein. It's like, who cares what they say? But I guess, well, they still wield enormous
power. Yeah, apparently this is the problem that Trump faces, right? I mean, Trump had this problem
in spades the first time he was elected. Trump comes into the White House and he has to pick
advisors, but it's not like he has a large number or even a small number of foreign policy experts
who share his foreign policy views, right? Uh because he has to draw from the establishment,
right? So you want to remember that Trump was very interested in improving relations with Russia and
with Putin in particular the first time round and he failed completely. Where Trump succeeded was
on China. Trump abandoned engagement. We talked about engagement being a disastrous policy. Trump
abandoned engagement and moved to containment in 2017. He ran as a candidate in 2016 explicitly
against engagement. Got rid of it immediately. I believe that was a smart thing to do and to pursue containment. He also Trump wanted to improve relations with Putin which I think made eminently
good sense. He couldn't do that in part because of Russia gate but also because the foreign policy establishment was so committed to NATO expansion. So he failed on that count. But the
problem is he was surrounded by advisors in that first administration who were all very hawkish on
Ukraine and very hawkish about American foreign policy in general, very hawkish about the forever
Why the US Foreign Policy Establishment Is So Hawkish on Middle Eastern Wars
wars. Right. So, so what's I don't understand since you raised it, what is the connection? The
same people who are telling me we need to fight a regime change war against Iran are the same ones
who are hysterical about supporting Ukraine in its and continuing our war against Russia,
the Mark Leven and and and then the smarter people um but same orientation. What I what do
they have in common? I don't really understand. Well, you have a foreign policy establishment, whether you're talking about the Republican side or you're talking about the Democratic side,
that is deeply committed to pursuing hawkish foreign policy just for its own sake. No,
no. They believed that that's what's good for the United States. They believe we should spend
uh exceedingly large amounts of money on defense, that we should be willing to use military force
in a rather liberal fashion. Uh they believe that military force can solve all sorts of problems. U
they believe that the United States, and this was certainly true during the unipolar moment, can use
that military force to spread liberal democracy around the world. We can spread democracy at
the end of a rifle barrel. This is what the Bush doctrine was all about in the Middle East. Iraq
was just the first stop on the train line, right? We were going to do Iran, Syria, and eventually
everybody would just throw up their hands. We were going to democratize the entire Middle East and we were going to use military force to do that. So, we are uh in a very important way
addicted to war. Now, it's important to emphasize that a lot of this has to do with Israel, right?
because Israel's supporters have a deep-seated interest in making sure that the United States
has a remarkably powerful military and is willing to use that military in a rather liberal fashion
because they believe that if Israel ever gets into trouble and it needs help from the United States,
the ideal situation is to have a US military that's like a cocked gun. And if you think about
the recent war between Israel and Iran, it really wasn't just between Israel and Iran. It was Israel
and the United States against Iran, right? Clear clearly. Clearly, right? And the United States
had a huge number of military assets in the Middle East, right, that were there in large part to help
the Israelis in their war against Iran. Well, if you think about it, it makes perfectly sense if
you're a supporter of Israel to want to make sure that the United States has a large military and
that it is willing to use that military and that if need be, it can help Israel if it gets into
Why the US Puts Israel’s Interests First
trouble. I didn't hear any reference to American interests in that description. Well, when it comes
to Israel, right, and what Israel needs, right, that has little to do with American interests,
right? The truth is any two countries in the world are going to have similar interests plus
different interests. Yes. Right. So, there's no question that Israel and the United States have
sometimes have similar interests and sometimes have different interests. Let me give you an example of this. The United States has a vested interest in making sure Iran does not have nuclear
weapons. Yes, we're against proliferation. It's in the American national interest. It's obviously in
Israel's national interest for Iran not to have nuclear weapons, right? So, two states can have
similar interests. In the case of Israel and the United States, they also happen to have different
interests. And what we have in the United States is a situation where we have this thing called
the Israel lobby, which I of course have written about with Steve Wald, which goes to great lengths
to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally. In other words, no matter what
Israel does, we are supposed to support Israel. And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful,
it is so effective that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that
means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel's interests are not the same as America's interests,
we support Israel. We support Israel's interests, not America's interests because over and against
America's interests, of course, because the interests clash in those specific instances,
right? Which is, as you noted at the outset, just the nature of like sovereign countries doing
business with each other. You're going to agree on some things and disagree on others. Absolutely. But can you think of any uh moment in the last say 40 years where there was that clash between
non-converging interests where the United States chose its own interests over Israel's interests?
No. No. I can't think of anything that fits that description. I mean, one could argue that Israel
wanted us to fight against Iran in 2024. that they tried to to bait us into attacking Iran
uh in April uh and then in July and uh as I said before the Biden administration did not take the
bait. Can you think conversely of instances where the US government chose the interest of a foreign
power over and against its own interests and its people's interests besides the Israeli case? No,
no. In in the case of Israel, you know, we're allied with Israel informally and you know,
they want us to do something that is hurtful to us, does not help our interests at all, but we do it anyway. Can you think of examples of that? Two-state solution is the best example.
Every American president since uh at least Jimmy Carter has pushed forcefully for creating a
Palestinian state. We have long believed that the best solution to the Palestinian problem,
which is the taproot of so many other problems that we face in the Middle East, is to create two
states. Uh so every president has pushed hard except for maybe Donald Trump for a two-state
solution in the Middle East. uh the Israelis have rebuffed us uh at every turn and uh the end result
is we now have a greater Israel and there's no possibility of a two-state solution. How does it hurt the United States not having a Palestinian state? Why is it in our our interest? Why is every
president pushed for that? Because the United States has a vested interest in having peace in the Middle East. Uh it's not in our interest to have wars in that region. Uh first of all, it
forces us to commit military forces. It forces us to fight wars. Uh and that's not in our interest.
And uh we have long felt from a strategic point of view that what you want to do is make sure uh you
have peace in that region. You want to remember right before October 7th, Jake Sullivan, who was
then the national security adviser, was crowing about the fact that we had not seen uh the Middle
East so peaceful in a long period of time. He understood full well that this is in our interest.
Well, if you compare the world uh you know uh on October 6th uh 2023 with the world uh that
exists in the Middle East today, we are much worse off today. Uh this is not in our interest. Uh and
The Palestinian Genocide
this is in large part because of Israel. And this is just the strategic dimension. We're not even
talking about the moral dimension. I mean, the Israelis are executing a genocide in Gaza. And
we are complicitists in that genocide. When you say it's a genocide, what what do you mean? Well,
if you look at what the definition of a genocide is, um, right? It's where one country uh tries to
destroy uh either all or a substantial portion of another group uh another ethnic or religious
or national group uh for the purposes of basically destroying that group identity. That's what you're
talking about here. Uh I think that uh that's the definition of je of genocide. uh it's laid out
in the 1948 uh convention. Uh I think that what the Israelis are doing fits that description. Uh
and lots of people and organizations uh agree with me on that point. It's very important to
understand here that just killing large numbers of Palestinians is not necessarily genocide.
I mean, the United States when it firebombed Japan in World War II killed many more Japanese than the
Israelis have killed Palestinians in Gaza. There's no question about that. But no one would ever accuse the United States of executing a genocide against Japan. The United States was
killing large numbers of Japanese civilians. And by the way, we killed large numbers of German civilians as well. Millions. Yeah. for purposes of ending the war. We wanted to end the war. And
if you look at how we treated the Japanese and how we treated the Germans once the war ended,
it was very clear that we were not bent on genocide. This is not to excuse what we did
against Japan and Germany. And I do believe we murdered, I would use the word murdered,
large numbers or millions of Japanese and Germans together. But in the case of what's going on in
Gaza, right, what's happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy
the Palestinians as a national group, right? They're they're targeting them as Palestinians
and they're trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering
huge numbers of Palestinians. And I mean, it's not just a rage reflex. This is a strategy. Of course,
at 2 and a half years later, almost 3 years later, what is the strategy? What's what's the the goal
of this? My view on this is that the Israelis have long been interested in expelling the Palestinian
population from greater Israel. If you look at greater Israel, this includes the Israel that
was created in 1948 and the occupied plus the occupied territories. Uh this is the West Bank,
Post 67, post 67, West Bank and Gaza. So West Bank, West Bank, Gaza, and what we call green
line Israel. That's Greater Israel. Inside greater Israel, there are about 7.3 million Jews and about
7.3 million Palestinians. And from the get-go, going back to the early days of Zionism, uh,
and the views of people like David Bengurian, they believed that you needed a Jewish state that was
about 80% Jewish and 20% Palestinian. In an ideal world, you would get rid of all the Palestinians,
but the least bad alternative is 80/20. But you actually have a situation in greater Israel where
you have 50/50. So October 7th happens and what the Israelis see is an excellent opportunity for
ethnic cleansing. And they make this clear. In other words, it's an excellent opportunity to go
to war in Gaza and drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and solve that demographic problem that they
face. That's such a uh a dark thing and therefore that's a very strong allegation. On what basis are
you making it? Oh, there's just a huge amount of uh data that supports this in the Israeli press
that they have they have been perfectly willing to make this argument loudly and clearly. The issue
of genocide, which I'll get to in a second, is a different issue. I'm separating ethnic cleansing
from genocide. So, what happens after October 7th is that the Israelis see an opportunity to
drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. And you want to remember that you had massive ethnic cleansing
in 1948 when the state is created. Virtually all of those people in Gaza are descendants of the
ethnic cleansing of 1948. Kicked out of another place and sent to Gaza. Yeah. And by the way,
there was another massive ethnic cleansing after the 67 war in the West Bank. So this is the third
attempt at a massive ethnic cleansing in Gaza. So this is hardly surprising at all. And in fact,
if you go back and read the literature uh on the creation of Israel, uh this is all
thoroughly de documented. Ethnic cleansing was a subject that the Zionists talked about from
the get-go. And they talked about extensively because there was no way they could create a greater Israel without doing massive ethnic cleansing. You want to remember that when
the Zionists come to Israel starting in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they're remarkably few Jews
in Palestine. And those Jews are not Zionists. The Zionists are the Jews who come from Europe,
right? And they understand that they're moving into a territory that's filled with Palestinian villages and Palestinian people. And the question you have to ask yourself is, how can you create a
Jewish state on a piece of territory that's filled with Palestinians without doing ethnic cleansing,
massive ethnic cleansing? And the answer is you can't. So they're talking about and thinking about
ethnic cleansing from the get-go. So the idea that they wouldn't think of what the situation
looks like after October 7th as an opportunity to do ethnic cleansing, you know, it belies. So it
wasn't really a land without people for a people without land. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
and and and David Bengurian, Vladimir Jabbatinsky, all these key Zionist leaders understood that full
well and they understood that they were going to have to do horrible things to the Palestinians.
They understood that and they were explicit in saying that they did not blame the Palestinians
one second for resisting what the Jews from Europe were going to do to them. They fully understood
that they were stealing their land and they fully understood that it made perfect sense for the
Palestinians to resist, which of course they did. But anyway, just to fast forward to October 7th,
what happens after October 7th is that the Israelis see an excellent opportunity
to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza. You have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Just to be clear, you have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, about 3.2 million
uh in um West Bank, West Bank, and about 1.8 in great in uh green line Israel. Okay. So, this is
an opportunity to get rid of those Palestinians. And the way to do it is to turn the IDF,
the Israeli military loose, and let them tear the place apart. And the idea is that that will just
drive the Palestinians out. But the problem that the Israelis face is the Palestinians don't leave.
Both the Egyptians and the Jordanians, which are the two countries that the Israelis would
like to drive the Palestinians into, make it, you know, unequivocally clear that that's not going
to happen. That's Jordan is just a giant refugee camp already. It already is from all these other wars that have been inspired for the same reason. So, um I mean I think Jordan is what percentage
Jordanian is Jordan? I mean tiny percentage Jordan. Well, it's definitely less than 50%. Way
less. Way less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Egypt has 100 million people already. So, but here's what
happens, Tucker. And it I think it makes sense if you listen to the logic. They start with the
goal of ethnic cleansing. They I don't believe they want to murder all of the Palestinians in
uh Gaza. They just simply want to drive them out. But the problem is they don't leave. And
then the question is what do you do? And what they do is they continue to up the attacks,
increase the attacks, kill more and more people in the hope that they will drive them out. And
The Zionist Mission for Greater Israel
I'm sorry, I should have asked this. Why do they want Gaza in the first place? There seems a lot of trouble killing all these people committing, you know, atrocities on camera. I mean, the press
are barred, but we're still getting a lot of video out of the area. That's a big hit. Why do you Why would you be willing to go through all of that to get Gaza? Why do they want it? Well,
the Zionists from the beginning have wanted a greater Israel. And David Bengurian wrote
a piece in 1918. And David Bengorian, of course, is the founding father of Israel. Wrote a piece
in 1918. I don't think it's ever been published in English. It's just in Yiddish where he describes
what his goals are for a greater Israel, right? And it obviously includes green line Israel,
Gaza, the West Bank. It includes parts of the East Bank. It includes parts of southern Syria.
It includes parts of southern Lebanon and it includes uh the Sinai Peninsula. Just think about
that. That was Bengurian's vision. And this was a vision that was shared by almost all the early
Zionist leaders. And there are still many people in Israel who are in favor of a greater Israel.
They don't want a tiny Israel. The Israel that was created in 1948 is a tiny state. Yes. E even with
Gaza and the West Bank, it's quite small. It's a postage stamp-like state, right? They want more
territory and they believe they have a historical right to that territory. Israel has never said
these are our final borders. What are Israel's final borders? They've never been articulated. And
the reason is the Israelis don't want to say out loud. The early Zionists did not say out loud what
their intentions were. David Bengurian didn't get up on a soap box and say we are going to create a
greater Israel and it's going to include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, the occupied territories,
Green Line Israel, the Sinai and so forth and so on. It's just a little um I mean irony doesn't
isn't powerful enough a word. I can't think of one. It's odd that the very same people who
were saying we need to consider tactical nukes in order to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign nation Ukraine because national borders are sacrianked. You know that's our our sacred
norms are violated when those borders are violated are saying it's totally okay for this one country
to like take over other countries. But this gets back to my point to you. We s yes we I agree
completely. We support Israel unconditionally. Right? In other words, whatever Israel does,
especially visav the Palestinians, the United States backs them to the hilt. And the fact that
they're changing borders. I mean, I look at what they're doing in Lebanon and Syria, and you would
think that the United States would have a vested interest in trying to put pressure on the Israelis
uh to stop causing murder and mayhem in Lebanon and in Syria. But we do hardly anything at all.
And those are real countries. Those are ancient countries and beautiful, beautiful countries with sophisticated, intelligent people. And like that the roots of Christianity are there. And like it's
not, in other words, I mean there's a sense if you're fighting over Sinai or something, it's one thing, but like Lebanon, I mean, that's like one of the great countries in the world. Syria,
same thing. And they're being destroyed. I don't understand why people allow that to happen. Well,
let me explain to you what Israel's goal is here. F. First of all, Israel's goal is to create Laban's realm. That's what I was describing to you when I said uh what Bengurian's vision was
regarding borders. So, can you define the word? Laben's realm means living room. You you want
you want a big country. You want lots of space for your people. Yes. Strategic depth. Strategic
depth. Yeah. And uh so that's one goal. The second goal that the Israelis have is they want to make
sure that their neighbors are weak. And that means breaking them apart if you can, right? And keeping
them broken. So the Israelis were thrilled that mainly the United States and the Turks broke apart
Syria. One could argue that Syria was even broken before Assad fell. But the Israelis want Syria to
be a fractured state. They want Lebanon to be a fractured state. what they want in Iran. You know,
we talk about the nuclear program, the nuclear enrichment program, and the argument is sometimes made that the principal goal, the only goal is to go in and uh and eliminate their nuclear
capability. That's a lie. Well, it's just part of the story. You could call it a lie. What what the
Israelis want to do is they want to break Iran apart. They want to make it look like Syria,
right? You want neighbors that are not powerful. you want them to be fractured. Jordan and Egypt,
they have a different solution there. And what's happened is because those countries are economically backwards, the United States gives them huge amounts of economic aid, I've
noticed. Yep. And and that's done for a purpose. And anytime the Egyptian And what's the purpose?
Because anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppety about Israel, the United States reminds
them, "You better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be
friendly to Israel." So Jordan and Egypt never caused the Israelis any problem. It sounds like
The Power of the Israel Lobby
our entire foreign policy, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is based on this one country. Well,
I would say in the Middle East, well, yeah, in the Middle East, uh, there is no question. People
now call it West Asia, I believe, but I call it the Middle East. In the Middle East, our policy
is profoundly influenced by Israel. We give, as I said to you before, we have a special relationship
with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. Just very important to understand it.
There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship
that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests. And when a
great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always,
except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests. America first. But when it
comes to Israel, it's Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there,
there's just abundant evidence to support that. So then the question I mean there's so many questions
but um the question is why like what is that? And it's I think it's really um causing serious
problems in the current ruling coalition because it's the contradiction is too obvious. It's not America first and people can see that because it's so so evident. But what are the causes of it?
Like why would for the first time as you said in recorded history a nation spend you know whatever
it is a trillion dollars a year in effect to serve the interest of another country like why well I
believe there's one simple answer the Israel lobby uh I I think the lobby is an incredibly
powerful interest group. Uh and I'm choosing my words carefully. Uh it has awesome power and
uh it uh basically is in a position where it can uh profoundly influence uh US foreign policy in
the Middle East and indeed it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it
comes to the Middle East and again the Palestinian issue in particular, it it has awesome power and
there's no president uh who is willing to buck the lobby. What sort of power is it? Because it's not
it's not rhetorical. It's not, you know, the most powerful movements in history are fueled by an
idea. It's usually the most powerful fueled by an idea that it's like true, right? But I never hear
anybody make a detailed case for why the United States benefits from the current arrangement.
Never. No one ever. Nikki Haley came as close as anyone by saying the United States gets a lot more
out of the relationship than Israel does, but then never explained how exactly that works. So it's
not a matter of like convincing people clearly. So what is it a matter of? Where does that power come
from? Well, let me put this in a broader context. Uh I think that uh in the past when I was younger
uh the lobby operated on two levels. One was the policy level and two was the popular discourse.
Yes. And I think in terms of the popular discourse for a long long time, right? And and this would be
well into the 2000s. The Israel lobby, the Israel lobby basically influenced the discourse in ways
that made the Israelis look like the good guys and it made it look like every time the United
States supported Israel, it was because it was in our national interest. Right? So the discourse was
not at odds with what was happening at the policy level. right now. The situation you described,
which I think is a perfect description of the situation that we face today, is that the lobby
has lost control of the discourse. And people now understand that the United States is doing things
for Israel that are not in the American national interest. Furthermore, they see the lobby out in
the open engaging in smashmouth politics. People are now fully aware that there is a lobby out
there that it's trying to control the discourse and in fact it basically does control maybe
that's a bit too strong a word but it's close. It basically does control the policy makers. So now
you have this real dis controls the policy makers. I mean we just that's demonstrable you know I
think it's measurable. Yeah. So yes but you so you have what you were describing is the disconnect
between the discourse and the policy world that now exists. But what I'm saying to you is you
want to remember that the lobby was immensely successful for a long period of time because the
disc the discourse and the policy process looked like they were in sync. so successful that just
basic historical facts about the creation of this nation state in 1948 are like unknown to people
and it's shocking to hear them uh and you think well that can't be right that's like so far from
what I heard as a child that that's obviously what all the Christians were kicked out all these Christians were kicked out of their historic homelands there and of course many more Muslims
and did that really happen I mean people just have no idea what the facts are kind of interesting yes
will the lobby went to great lengths to make sure that you didn't know the facts. And anyone who said the facts out loud was like a like a lunatic or a jihadist or or a you know hater of some kind.
An anti-semite. Yeah. Self-hating Jews. You know, it's very interesting. I often think about my own
um evolution in this regard. When I grew up as a kid, I was heavily influenced by Leon Urus's
book Exodus and then the subsequent movie with I think Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint
uh and that of course that Exodus story portrayed the Israelis in the most favorable light and the
Arabs or Palestinians in the most negative light. So for much of my life, uh, you know, up until the
late 80s, early 90s, I thought the Israelis were without a doubt the good guys up against the bad
guys. And it was really David versus Goliath as well. And the Israelis were David up against an
Arab Goliath. That was the picture I had in my head. But then in the late 80s, early 90s, a group
of historians in Israel called the new historians came on the scene. Benny Morris, Benny Morris, Avi
Schlime, Elon P. Uh, some of them were amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I agree. And and what they did was
they had access to the archives. Yes. And they told the real story. And that was a moment where
I think the country felt Israel felt confident enough to allow that conversation internally and
that honesty. I think that's exactly right. The lobby had been so successful. Israel had been so
successful. Yes. I went there. I was amazed. What a beautiful place. Great people. It was great.
Yeah. Yeah. They thought they controlled. They had things under control. They did. That's right. And
that they could allow these historians to tell the truth. Now, I believe they could have gotten away
with it if they had stopped expanding or if they had agreed to a two-state solution. The problem is
that after the early 1990s, when this literature came out, the Israelis continued to act in
barbaric ways towards the Palestinians. And well, they had a prime minister who tried to reverse
the trend and then guess he was shot to death. He was moving in that direction. I think there were
a number of Israeli leaders who understood that the course that Israel was on was unsustainable.
You often heard them say that. Yeah. There was a robust debate within the country about this. Well, whether they would have agreed to a Palestinian state ultimately is an open question. But the fact
is Rabin was killed. Ahood Barack who made moves towards a two-state solution ultimately couldn't
pull it off and we are where we are today and the problem is that something else occurred in the
late 90s early 2000s which fundamentally affected Israel's position and that's the internet because
once you get the internet and once you get social media and the mainstream media is not the sole
source of information on these issues. The story about the real creation of Israel and what Israel

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Part 3 of 3

The Attempts to Shut Down Criticism of Israel
is doing today is available to the vast majority and it's shock it's shocking to people. Um so you
have to shut down the internet. You can't allow that. Yeah, you can try to shut down the internet
but you know there are limits to what you can do. Uh but it does seem like um you so you you
you were describing the two separate tiers, the policy and the discourse about the policy and
that one remains basically the same, but the other has changed just so radically, so radically and so
fast that it's gone off in some dark directions that I just want to say on the record I totally disapprove of. I don't think you should hate anybody period, especially groups of people.
It's immoral and I mean it. But that's happened because there's been like a ma an avalanche of
new information, a lot of which is totally real. People haven't seen it before and their minds
are exploding. And so public opinion is moving so radically in the other direction. I feel it
all around me. Do you feel this? Of course. Yeah. And your life I mean I should say for people who aren't familiar with your background, you wrote a book with Steven Walt of Harvard. You're at
the University of Chicago. So both of you are, you know, have tenure or famous in your world,
you're not crazy, and uh you write this book in 2007 and both of you are immediately attacked
in like pretty shocking ways. Also defended u by some of your colleagues, but but really maligned
for it. And now 18 years later, people are saying that Marshmer guy actually he was kind of right
about everything. So that's a reflection, I think, of the change in public opinion, but that that's
not sustainable. You can't have in a democracy policy that's 180 degrees from public opinion
over time. That just doesn't work. So you have to either change the policy or change public opinion.
And no one's even making any attempt at all to change public opinion through good faith argument,
through like, hey, I know you think this, but you're wrong and here's why. There's zero, none. It's shut up Nazi. Okay. And that's not working. So I really think the only option is to stop the
conversation. Or maybe I'm missing something. Like censorship is the only the only option if you want
to maintain status quo. Well, there's no question that they're trying to stop the conversation. Yes,
there's no question. I mean, they went to great lengths to shut down Tik Tok and the evidence is
that uh the lobby played a key role just banning one of the world's biggest social media apps cuz
it says things you don't like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is the way they've always behaved. The
lobby's always behaved this way. And uh I mean, this is what happened to me and Steve. You know,
we originally wrote an article and uh we at one point thought the article would never be
published. Uh after we wrote the article uh and we went through all sorts of interactions with
the Atlantic Monthly that had commissioned the article, we put the article in the back
closet and just so you were asked to write a piece about the influence of a foreign lobby,
the Israeli lobby in Washington, uh which is one of many foreign lobbies in Washington, but
it's by far the most effective and the biggest. And you write the piece and they didn't run it. Yeah. Why? because they got cold feet. I mean, what invariably happens in these cases is that
uh down at the lower levels of a journal or or a newspaper, people will be interested in somebody
writing something on uh the Israel lobby or writing a piece that's critical of Israel,
but then as it filters up the chain of command and people at the top see it, they kill it.
Right. And and that happened to you. Oh, that's definitely what happened at the lobby at the Atlantic Monthly. They killed it. And then Steve and I went to uh Princeton University Press and a
handful of other journals and asked if they would be interested in either the article or turning the article into a book. Uh and in all of those cases, everybody at first uh exudes enthusiasm. They
think it's a it's a great topic. Something needs to be written on it, which of course is true. But then they think about it for a month and you get a call back and uh they've lost interest. So
Steve and I actually put the uh the article as I said in that closet and just said what's wild is
you're both at this point very well known in your Can you explain who Steve is to your co-authors?
Yeah, Steve uh is a chaired professor at Harvard University and at the time that we wrote the lobby
uh article. Uh he was the academic dean at the Kennedy School. Okay. So, I just I I sure a lot
of people already know that, but I just want to make it totally clear. You're not two random guys in the internet who are like anti-semmites or something at all. You're like the some of the most
famous people in your field and you're totally moderate. I don't even know what your politics are, but you're not a political activist at all. No, as and I as I used to like to say, if Adolf
Hitler were alive, he would have thrown Steve's wife and his two children in a gas chamber,
right? I mean, the idea that we're anti-semites, I mean, this is a laughable argument. We're both
first order phosmites. I mean, I can't prove that, but it's true in my humble opinion. But anyway,
we we were certainly, you know, at the top of our academic disciplines and highly respected,
which is not to say people didn't disagree with what we wrote. Uh, but you weren't crackpots at
all. And and the other thing is I want to make it clear that we worked very carefully with the Atlantic to get our final draft draft up to their standards, right? We did what they wanted. And
uh and you also want to remember that Steve and I are both excellent writers. Many academics cannot
write clearly. Whatever you think of the substance of our views, there's no doubt there were two of the best writers in the business. And it's the two of us working with the editors uh at the lower
rungs of the Atlantic Monthly that produced what I thought was an excellent article. But anyway,
it was killed there and we couldn't get it published. Kind of proven your point. Yes. Ex.
Exactly. Exactly. And uh uh by the way, I probably shouldn't tell this story, but I'll tell you I I
we told the editor uh at The Atlantic as we were going through the process that uh we thought he
was getting cold feet and he was quite offended by that. And he said to us just to prove that
that wasn't true, he would give us a $10,000 kill fee. That means if they didn't take the article,
they'd give us $10,000. So I said to Steve, I remember it very well, that's the fastest $10,000
we ever made. He said, "Oh, John, you're being too cynical." Anyway, we collected the $10,000. Did
you think he paid you? Yes. Yes. I mean, but what what he did, how ashamed was he when he because
I'm not going to name him. I know the editor. This is a pretty well-known editor who's just been in
magazine journalism for decades and, you know, has a high regard for himself and good reputation,
all this stuff. And he's told from somebody else who's more powerful than he is, you can't do this. How embarrassed was he in that conversation? I I had no evidence that he was embarrassed. Oh,
so he has no soul. Okay. I No, I I I mean, who knows, you know, what kind of face he had
to put on things. I I don't know what happened inside the Atlantic. I've never been told. But
uh uh uh but again, he said he'd give us a $10,000 kill fee because he thought the peace was going to
go forward. And somebody uh sat on him and told him that that was not going to happen. I I don't
know what happened, but he I don't want to be too harsh on him because this is the norm. Yeah. That
this was the norm. He didn't own the magazine. And so what we did was we put it in the back closet.
And and I remember Steve and I had a conversation and I think Steve said to me, "This is why we have
tenure so that you can spend two years of your life writing something that never gets published
and you're not punished in terms of promotion to tenure." Right? But anyway, what then happened
is that somebody inside the Atlantic um who was actually involved in the original commissioning
of the article gave a copy to a very prominent academic who uh had com uh who had um contacts
close contacts at the London Review of Books and uh that academic who I knew very well uh sent me
a note and said that Mary Kay Wilmer's he said I got a hold of your manuscript and uh I sent it to
Mary Kay Wilmer's at the London Review of Books and she'd be very interested in publishing it and
uh so I then I remember I was in H Highidleberg, Germany. I called up Mary Kay uh and she published
it. Uh thankfully it was like a bomb it was like a bomb went off. I'll I'll remember that. I remember
that so vividly. So the piece The Atlantic Kill comes out in the London Review of Books. What's
the thesis of the piece if you could just sum it up for people who didn't read it? Well, the argument basically has four parts to it. The first says that the United States has this special
relationship with Israel. It's unparalleled in history. We give Israel unconditional support
uh huge amounts of military and economic aid. That's the first part. Then the second part says
it's not for strategic reasons that we do this. Then the third part is not it's can you explain
what that means not for it's not in the American national interest in in other words uh from a
geopolitical point of view right because Israel and the United States sometime have different
interests it makes no sense for us to support Israel unconditionally we should support Israel
when its interests reflect our interests but otherwise not but that's not the case so that's
another way of saying what we're doing is not in our strategic interest. Okay. Third part is it's
not in our moral interest because when you look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians,
this violates basic American precepts, liberal precepts, right? So from a moral point of view,
uh what's happening in Israel doesn't make sense. So then the fourth part deals with the question of
why we do this, right? Fair. If we don't question, right? If we don't do it for strategic reasons, we don't do it for moral reasons, why do we do it? And the answer is the lobby. So that's the story,
the lobby. It does. And the the lobby is a is a very large complex informal organization of which
Apac is a part but not the total. Absolutely. Um and then you describe how that works. Yeah, it's a
very important to emphasize it's a loose coalition of individuals and organizations like Apac,
the Anti-Defamation League and so forth and so on that uh work overtime to support Israel loosely
coordinated. I think your description was right on the money. very important to understand it
is not a Jewish lobby and it is not a Jewish lobby because many Jews don't care much about Israel and
many Jews are opposed to what Israel or the Israel lobby is doing including many religious Jews Torah
Jews sincere sincerely Jewish Jews disagree I know some so I know absolutely there are a large number
of Jews who are anti-Zionists I'm aware right so so You're exactly right. So, it's not a Jewish
Why Are Christians in the West Supporting Israel’s Killing of Christians in the Middle East?
lobby uh for that reason, but also there are the Christian Zionists. Yes. Who are a core element of
that lobby? I've noticed uh you know, Christians United for Israel, for example. So, that's why
we call it the Israel lobby. And what explains the enthusiasm of Christian groups for policies
that kill Christians in the Middle East? Well, they have this belief that until Israel controls
uh all of greater Israel, right? Uh it gets back all the territory uh that is rightfully theirs.
Uh you won't have the second coming. Uh so they are deeply committed, these Christians, ionists,
to supporting Israel's conquest. uh and supporting Israeli expansion for religious reasons. And are
there defined borders that when reached will trigger the second coming? No. No. Do when
we say greater Israel, do we have a clear map in mind of what that will mean? Could mean? No. No. Whenever you talk about greater Israel, there's hardly ever a real map in mind. I talk about it in
terms of the occupied territories plus green line Israel. But obviously the Israelis themselves,
most Israelis I think have uh a bigger uh map in in mind. Do we know where that ends? I mean
it doesn't go to Cairo I assume. No. No. I think the Sinai what they take of Egypt I think will if
they can will be the Sinai. Uh and I don't think they would take all of Syria or all of Lebanon but
they would take big chunks of the south of those two countries. uh but uh but but the idea behind
the Christian Zionists is that to facilitate the second coming uh you know for religious reasons we
should support Israel but this does as you say uh cut against the fact that the Israelis often time
uh treat Christians as badly as they do Muslims. Uh there was recently a case where they bombed a
Catholic church in northern Gaza. Uh and Trump was infuriated when he heard this and he called
up Netanyahu and told him this is recently like within the past two weeks told Netanyahu that he
had to apologize. Uh and uh the Pope even spoke out on this but even there the criticism is quite
muted. Uh because again, hardly anybody in the West really criticizes Israel in a meaningful
way. It is just a little bit odd that you could on Christian grounds support the bombing of a Christian church. I mean, there are lots of theological differences between sex and
Christianity. But if you're getting to the point like where Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, is where you think Jesus is commanding you to support the murder of Christians,
you don't need to be like a theologian to think maybe I've gone off course. No. Yeah,
you're not going to get any argument from me on that. Yeah. So, um where does it go from here now
that things that you know everyone was afraid to talk about any of this to the extent that people
understood it because they don't want to be called names and because those names are it's horrible to
be called that and it's almost sometimes it's true but for most people it's not true at all. They're
not hateful. That's not why they have these views. So once those slurs lose their power, as I think
they quickly are, in the same way the word racist lost its power from overuse, like where are we?
What where do we what happens next? It's hard to tell a happy story, but here's how I think about
it. U the first question you might ask yourself is what are the Israelis likely to do moving
forward? In other words, if the Israelis all of a sudden got reasonable, uh a lot of these problems
would go away. But there is no sign the Israelis are going to get more reasonable. If anything,
the political center of gravity is moving further and further to the right in Israel as the years
go by. So Israeli behavior in the Middle East, if anything, is likely to be even more aggressive and
more offensive to people around the world. So what does that mean here in the United States?
It means that the lobby is going to have to work even harder than it's now working. And again,
you want to remember the lobby's now out in the open and it's engaging in smashmouth politics, but
it's going to have to work harder. Now, you say to yourself, most vicious people I've ever dealt with ever. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody who's dealt with them, and I've dealt with them for longer than you have,
understands full well what you're talking about. But see, here's the problem, Tucker. The problem is that support among younger people for Israel is much weaker than it is among older people.
People including Jews. Including Jews. Yes. Yes. Very important to emphasize that. Very important.
The Growing Opposition Towards Israel Among Young People
Uh so the problem is that inside of American society, you're moving towards a situation where
increasing numbers of people in the body politic are critical of Israel, extremely critical of
Israel because older people are dying off and those younger people are turning into older people. So the body populace in the United States is going to be more critical of Israel over time,
not less critical. At the same time, Israel continues to behave that way. And the question is,
how long can we go on with the lobby operating out in the open and engaging in smashmouth
politics? And I attacking Americans in the most vicious way, who have no animist toward anyone,
but just want to help their own country, they're somehow criminals. Like that that that can't go on
long. That's too stupid to work over time. No, I agree. Look at what's happening on campuses,
right? Uh here you have these students out there protesting, protesting a genocide,
right? Many of the students who are out there protesting are Jewish. This cannot be emphasized
enough. Many of them are Jewish. And all of a sudden, they're turned into raving anti-semites.
This is all about anti-semitism. It has nothing to do with the genocide that's taking place in
Palestine. This is crazy, right? And and I talk to people on campuses. Everybody understands this.
Everybody understands that th this has nothing to do with anti-semitism. I've been in academia for
decades. I've been at the University of Chicago for 44 years. Before October 7th, nobody at
Chicago or Harvard talked about an anti-semitism problem. It was just unheard of. Huge numbers of
administrators, including provos and presidents, were Jewish. Huge numbers of deans and faculty
members were Jewish. Huge numbers of students, graduate and undergraduate, were Jewish. This is
a wonderful thing. Nobody was ever critical of it. Was there an anti-semitism problem? I never heard
about it and I don't know anybody who was talking about it. But all of a sudden after October 7th,
what we discover is that these college campuses are hotbeds of anti-semitism. This makes no sense
at all because of course they were not hotbeds of anti-semitism. What they were were hot beds
of criticism of Israel and what it was doing to the Palestinians. But you can't say that.
Why? because you are in effect bringing attention to the genocide that's taking place in Gaza and
that is unacceptable. I mean newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
they never even use the word genocide or anything approximating that. It's just verboten. Uh and
the idea is to make Israel look like if anything it's the victim. That's the Wall Street Journal's
principal mission, right? to make Israel look like it's the victim. Wall Street Journal is so discredited as a newspaper. It's like I wouldn't I' I' I'd rather read the Guardian. I mean,
I'd rather read anything other than the Wall Street Journal. Well, I like to argue that the Wall Street Journal is two newspapers in one. Uh the news and then uh the opinion. It's all
been corrupted. It changed leadership and it's just the whole thing is total. I I know some great people who work there still and they're honest people. Um, but the paper is the most
dishonest I would say of all papers. That's just my view and I used to write for them. So, well, you'll get no argument from me. Uh, as bad as the New York Times and Washington Post are, they
pale in comparison to the Wall Street J. I totally agree. And at least the New York Times and the and especially the New York the Washington Post are just like liberal papers. Okay, there's Democratic
Party papers. I know exactly what you are. I'm not like the Guardian, just a leftwing paper, socialist paper. I'm not shocked by anything. They're pretty upfront about it. The Wall Street
Journal is uniquely offensive to me because of the deception involved. They pretend to be one thing,
but they're very much not that thing. They're something entirely different. And uh they're stealthy and incredibly dishonest. And uh I look forward to their demise with with uncchristian
Why Don’t We Know the Death Toll of Any of These Wars?
enthusiasm. Um excuse me. Uh but anyway, can I just ask you like a question I should have
asked before? You have this population of over 2 million people. How many remain in Gaza now? Do
we know there no there's no news coverage allowed so we don't I guess maybe we don't know but well
there are 2.3 million to start. Yes. That's that's the approximate number who are there.
Uh it appears that some have gotten out. Uh it's hard to gauge how many. Uh there was one person
who told me he thought that about 100,000 uh had gotten out. Another person told me 50,000. I'm
not sure. But not a million. Oh, no, no, no, no. The question is how many have been killed? Right.
Do we have any idea? Not really. Uh, they're, you know, the estimates are around 60 million. I mean,
60 million, excuse me, 60,000. Um, do you think it's weird that in 2025 we can measure everything
from your heart rate to sunspots that we don't know how many people were killed in Russia,
Ukraine, or Palestine? We can't even get I've never met anybody who can give me a hard number
on Russian casualties, Ukrainian casualties, or dead Palestinians in Gaza. That's weird. It's
weird. They're they're two different cases. Uh, I mean, the uh uh the Ukrainians have a deep-seated
interest, for example, in not revealing how many people have been killed. Of course, and so do the Russians, by the way. Yeah. Uh, and uh with regard to the uh case of Israel Palestine,
uh the the real problem here is that so many people are buried. Uh they're missing. Uh there
was a study that uh somebody did recently. It was a legitimate study that said that they believe or
the study concludes that there are about 400,000 missing people in 400,000. 400,000. Yeah. Now,
I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying that there obviously lots of missing people, right?
Well, if you look at what the Israelis have done in Israel, excuse me, what the Israelis have done
in Gaza, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is uh, you know, 400,000 dead. Uh, but who knows? Uh,
but I I think, you know, 60,000 roughly 60,000 is the number uh that a lots of people use on debt.
So, of the remaining, you know, probably less than two million, but close to two million people, it's
a lot of people. Where do they go? I mean, this is a great question. Can there actually be in 2025 a
transfer of people like that? I mean, the Second World War wasn't that long ago. Like, people have
memories or impressions of what it looks like to move that many people. Well, it's just not that's not good. Well, the news reports say that the Israelis and the Americans are talking to the
Libyans uh and the Ethiopians and the Indonesians about ex accepting the Palestinians or at least a
substantial portion of that, let's say 2 million that are left. Uh, but if they actually tried
that, um, I mean that's so grotesque that you'd think I mean, wouldn't the world just blow up if
they tried to do that? Move hundreds of thousands of people against their will from one from their
land, which they've been on for thousands of years into some foreign country and just like, "That's cool. We're doing this. It's for their safety." Could you actually do that?
Well, I didn't actually think that the Israelis could execute a genocide in Gaza. I didn't think
they'd be able to do what they have done since October 7th. There are no rules. You just do what you can do. And yeah, we're we're at a point where you want to say that that is a possibility.
I'm like you. I find it hard to imagine. I'm sickened by this the whole process of the whole
thing. I just I don't they all get on boats or something and like people have iPhones they can I mean well also I think there'll be resistance right I mean Hamas is still there the Israelis
have not defeated Hamas right? Yeah I mean so but your question is a great one. The question
is where do we end up here? What the hell? Where do we end up? You know, just to go back a bit,
uh, when the war starts on October 7th and then the fighting goes on into 2024, the Israeli
military is asking Netanyahu to tell them what the uh final political plan is. In other words,
once the war ends, what's the plan for dealing with the Palestinians? And Netanyahu refuses to
give the military a plan. And the military says, "We can't his own military, his own military,
the IDF. He The military says that we can't wage the campaign without knowing what the endgame is,
right?" Okay. But Netanyahu won't tell them what the endgame is because the end game is
to drive all the Palestinians out. The reason that Netanyahu has no plan, right, for dealing with the
Palestinians at the end of the fighting is because he expect them to he expects them to all be gone.
Okay? Now, what we're saying here is that hasn't happened. It's hard to imagine that happening,
right? And although the Israelis have been murdering huge numbers of Palestinian, at some point a substantial number are going to be left. So, the question is, what does that look
like? And they probably won't be more moderate by that point. No, but what they're going to end
up in is a giant ghetto, right? Or concentration camp. That's what they're building now. And again,
this gets back to our earlier discussion of what this means for Israel's reputation in the United
States and in the West more generally. You're going to build a ghetto. You're going to put, you know, 2 million people in a ghetto and continue to starve them. Is this sustainable?
uh what it does tend to affect your moral authority when you do that. I also think
it has a terribly corrupting influence on your society at large. Yeah. I I think once this war
comes to a conclusion, hopefully that will be sooner rather than later and the Israelis take
stock of what they have done uh this is going to have a deeply corrosive effect. Well, yeah,
because I mean I mean the things that are going on to Jewish Israelis at the hands of their own
government right now are I'm not an expert on Israel, but I've been uh multiple times
and I've always really loved it. I mean, it's such a amazing place, but it was liberal in a
fundamental way. That's why I always liked it. I mean, not liberal like Democratic Party liberal, but just like civil liberties liberal. if you were Jewish. Of course, that's a totally fair
point that kind of went over my head on my trips there, but I You're absolutely right. And it was
designed to go over your head. Yeah. And it did. You're absolutely right. Um but my point is the
things that are happening now to Israeli citizens are so shocking to me that total elimination of
free speech. You say certain things, you go right to jail. Question like what the hell happened on October 7th, which is a completely fair question. any in any free society that should be allowed,
not allowed. Banning people from leaving the country, your right to travel, especially to leave
is a foundational right. They're telling Israeli citizens you're not allowed to leave. I don't know why is that not a big story. I don't really get it. And then the treatment of Christians, which
is is disgusting. Um those are all signs that the society is becoming illiberal. Really is becoming
authoritarian. Very I mean that's authoritarian. you're not allowed to leave the country. You can't say what you think. That's not a free country. And those are all downstream of the military response
post October 7th. So I think it makes your point. This is corrupting to their society as the stuff
always is. 9/11 is totally corrupting to our society. I agree. Just add a couple points to
that. The uh Israeli military has a huge PTSD problem. Oh, I bet. Uh and really Yeah. Yeah.
And the Jerusalem Post had a piece, I think it was the Jerusalem Post had a piece the other day, uh,
that said there have been five suicides after the P during the past two weeks. Uh, so they're having
a significant problem with suicide, significant problem with PTSD, and they're having huge
problems uh, getting reser to report for duty. I bet. Uh because the Israeli military is heavily
dependent on reservists and the reserveists have basically had it. Uh and uh so this war
is having a corrosive effect. And the thing you want to understand is there's no end in sight, right? There really isn't. Yeah. And now they're in southern Lebanon. Now they're in southern
Syria. Wouldn't the United States shut this down tomorrow? Like not one more dollar for this stuff? You blew up a church? No more money for you. The fact that the Israelis are so dependent on us,
as we were talking about before, and we were just, you know, hitting on the tip of the iceberg, they
are so dependent on us means we have tremendous coercive leverage over them. This is why the this
is why the lobby has to work so hard, right? We have tremendous coercive leverage on them. So,
we could shut this down. We could fundamentally this afternoon. I don't want to go that far,
but we'd need a couple days, but yeah. No more money for you if you do one more. Well, we could also punish them in in significant ways. We could easily bring Israel to its knees. And by
the way, I have long argued that that would be in Israel's interest. It is not in Israel's interest.
It is not interesting Jew in the interest of Jews around the world for this craziness to continue. This craziness should end right away for the good of Israel, for the good of Jews,
for the good of the United States. It makes no sense at all. To what extent is this uh Netanyahu?
The Authoritarianism That Has Infected Israel
Like you often see him singled out as you know the guy who's pushing this whose vision this is. If
Netanyahu retired tomorrow, would this continue? Yes. The fact is that he is not unrepresentative
of the larger society. There are surely people on let's use the word left for lack of a better term.
There are certainly people on the left who oppose what he's doing and would be more amunable to a
political solution, but their numbers are small and dwindling. And I think the overwhelming
majority of uh Israelis support Netanyahu. That's why he's still in office despite the fact he was
responsible for what happened on October 7th. Of course, he was in charge. the buck is supposed
to stop at his desk, but he's not been held accountable because the Israelis want him
uh in charge. So, it's not like uh you know, he's the odd man out here. Furthermore, if you look at
the political spectrum in Israel, there are many people who are to the right of him. Yes. Who are
growing in political importance. when you and I were young, people like Smootrich, right,
and Ben Gir, right, who were far to the right of Netanyahu, you know, well, there weren't that
many of or at least that I was. I mean, again, I'm not an expert. I don't speak Hebrew, but I mean, I, you know, been around it a lot and I felt like, again, it was a pretty liberal European
type society. That was my impression of it. Well, those days are gone. Yes. No, I know those days
are gone. And my point to you is it's only going to get worse. So the argument that Netanyahu is
the problem, it's an argument that many liberal Jews here in the United States like to make the web like to make. If we only we can get rid of Netanyahu, our troubles will go away and we'll get
some sort of moderate leadership and work out a motus uh uh vendai with the United States. But uh
Will Israel Rebuild the Third Temple?
I don't think that's going to happen. What happens on the Temple Mount, do you think? So there's a um
the second temple was obviously built in on the mountain in Jerusalem. It was knocked down by the Romans in AD.70 and a few hundred years later the Muslims built the third holiest site in Islam,
the Alexa mosque there and beneath it is the foundation of the temple. That's the western wall. So that's the geography. But there is this push to rebuild the third temple but there's a mosque
on the site. My sense is that's coming to a head. Do you have any feeling about that? I think you're
right. I think the further right Israel moves or the more hawkish it becomes uh the more likely it
is that will come to a head. There's no question that uh uh certainly the religious right in Israel
uh is deeply committed to building a third temple. But you'd have to blow up the mosque to do it.
Yes. And what would happen if someone blew up the third holiest site in Islam in the middle
of Jerusalem? Well, the Israelis are very powerful visav uh the Palestinian population and they would
I guess uh go to great lengths to suppress any insurrection. Uh, and if they had to kill lots of
people, they'd kill lots of people. Look at what they're doing in Gaza. The Israelis are incredibly
ruthless. There's just no question about that. And, uh, they believe that Palestinians are
subhumans, uh, two-legged animals, grasshoppers. They use those kind of words. And uh you take what
they've been doing in Gaza, it's easy to imagine them doing horrible things to the Palestinians
if they were to rise up over what's happening uh with regard to the Temple Mount. And uh in terms
of the Jordanians or the Egyptians or the Saudis, are they going to do anything? I doubt it. I mean,
they'll make a lot of noise verbally, but in terms of actually doing anything to Israel,
the Israelis basically calculate in all these instances that what they can do is horrible things
and then with the passage of time, people will forget and not only will they forget, but we'll go to great lengths to help them forget. You know, we'll rewrite the history. That's the idea. Uh so,
I think that uh your assessment of what we should expect with the Temple Mount is probably correct.
feels like that's a I mean that's a you know they're a billion Muslims so but they have a
huge collective action problem what are those billion Muslims going to do I mean they can't
What Is Being Hidden in the 9/11, Epstein, and JFK Files?
organize themselves into armored divisions and strike into Israel no but they could I
mean I think we learned from 911 a small group of determined people can have a big effect on events oh yeah well that's all coming too right I mean this is one of the problems s that uh many
western Jews worry about that you know payback is going to come not in the form of attacks on Israel
but on in the form of attacks on western Jews in places like the United States or Europe uh and uh
I think that is a real possibility let's hope it doesn't happen but uh the number of people who are
in the in in the Arab and Islamic world who are absolutely enraged by what is going on in Gaza
is not to be underestimated and they have a second strike capability as you point out. You know,
I was talking about building armor divisions. That's foolish. They're not going to build armor divisions. But there are other ways to deal with this. Again, you want to go back to 911. This gets
back to the whole question whether Israel is a uh strategic liability or a strategic asset. uh
Khaled Shik Muhammad who is the principal planner of 911 now in Guantanamo and Osama bin Laden both
explicitly said that their principal reason for attacking the United States on 9/11 was the United
States's support of Israel's policies against the Palestinians. You just want to think about that.
The conventional wisdom in the United States is that Israel had nothing to do with 911 and
these Muslims attacked us because they hate who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Uh Obama Obama uh Osama bin Laden and KSM again have both explicitly said that it was US policy
toward Israel that caused 9/11. Why do you suppose that so many 9/11 documents are still classified
almost 25 years after the fact? I don't know. I mean, why are so many Jeffrey Epstein documents
uh effectively classified? Why are so many Kennedy assassination documents still not released? Still
not released. That's correct. You know, you really do wonder. They obviously have something to hide.
uh in most cases it's very hard to define what it is that they're trying to hide and that's
certainly true with regard to 9/11 but uh but we just don't know. We don't know and it and it
does make everybody into a into a wacko thinking about it. I mean if you want to end con so-called
The Future of the Global Stage
conspiracy theories tell the truth and then you know no one has to theorize would be my view.
Uh so you just you have a piece out is my last question to you. Thank you for spending all this time. Um, uh, you have a piece out that describes what you believe the world will look like in 50
years. And I should say, just to toot your horn since you're not going to do it, that you've been right on some of the big big big questions and you've stood essentially alone in your field um,
in your predictions and have been vindicated on them, not just about the power of foreign lobbies,
but about China, about NATO, and um, so I do think your opinion on this matters. Can you just give us
a sense of like 10 years hence what's America's place in the world? Well, I think if you look
out 10 years, even if you were to look out 20 or 30 years, I think in all likelihood the system,
the international system will continue to be dominated by three countries, the United States,
China, and Russia. And I think the United States and China will remain the two most
powerful countries on the planet. and the US China competition over the next 10 years and even beyond
that will influence international politics more than any other relationship. Uh I think that once
you begin to project out past 10 20 years uh the United States's position visav China I think will
improve for demographic reasons. uh I think the Chinese population is going to drop off at a much
more rapid rate than the American population. Uh and moreover the Americans can rely on immigration
to rectify the problem. Uh so if you look at population which is one of the two building
blocks population size one of the two building blocks of military power the other is wealth.
uh the United States looking out 20, 30, 40 years looks like it's in quite good shape right
now. What's happened since 2017 and really even before that is that with the rise of China, the
United States lost its position as the unipole, as the clearly dominant power in the international
system. and we now have a peer competitor. So when people talk about American decline, they're
correct that we have had decline, let's say since 2017 when China became a great power, although it
started before that. That's the second time you made reference to 2017 as the threshold for China. What is the definition? How does a country go from being a big power to a great power? It develops
enough military capability to put up a serious fight against the most powerful state in the
system. Thank you. Right. So, you want to remember the two main building blocks of military power are wealth and population size. You take that wealth, you take that population size, and that's what
allows you to build a powerful military. That affects your position in the balance of power.
And remember when I talked about engagement, we made China rich. We made China wealthy. So, China
always had that huge population and as a result of engagement during the unipolar moment from
roughly let's say 1992 to 2017 we helped China get rich and that rich that wealth coupled with that
population side China becomes a great power okay so we are losing relative power over that entire
time period and that's when China then becomes a power and we now have a competition where the
United States is still more powerful than China overall, but the Chinese are closing the gap. So,
we're still losing relative power to the Chinese. And I would bet over the next 10 years, we will
lose relative power. Not a substantial amount, but some. But still, the United States will probably
remain 10 years from now the most powerful state in the system. and the Chinese will be right behind us. The Russians will remain the weakest of those three great powers. But if you project out,
you know, 30, 40 years, that's when I think the United States will widen the gap with China
because populationwise, the Chinese population as a result of the one child policy will decline
significantly. And our population size without immigration will not decline as significantly as
the Chinese population will. But we also have immigration as our ace in the hole. So we can
bring in immigrants as we have done in the past and we will remain in quite good shape. So I think
the long-term future for the United States in terms of raw power looks quite good. That's not to
say our policies will be wise because as you and I know the United States has used that massive power
that it's had in the past in oftentimes foolish ways. Yeah. And is is that power worth having? I
mean I don't know. Oh, it's more complicated than it sounds. I mean, do people's lives improve? Which seems like an important measure. Not the only measure, but certainly one. Well,
this is the realist in me, Tucker. In the international system, in international politics,
because there's no higher authority that can protect you if you get into trouble. It's very
important to be powerful, right? You can't dial 911 in the international system and have someone
come and rescue you. And in a world where another state might be powerful and might attack you,
it's very important to be the most powerful state in the system. And the last thing you want to do
is be weak. But remember, the Chinese refer to the period from the late 1840s to the late 1940s
as the century of national humiliation. Yes, it was too. Yes. And why did they suffer a century
of national humiliation? Because they were weak. Because they were divided. Right? And remember, we talked earlier in the show about NATO expansion. We talked about why we continued to
push and push and push even though the Russians said it was unacceptable. And I said to you,
we were going to shove it down their throat. And why we were going to shove it down their throat? Because we thought they were weak. You'd never want to be weak. You want to be powerful.
The problem with making that argument today, for me to make that argument to you and to many people
I know is that we all understand that the United States has been incredibly powerful and it's used
that power in foolish ways in ways that don't make us happy. And therefore, the idea of having all
this power leads us to think or leads many people to think that we'll use that power foolishly. And
I fully understand that. But my argument is you still want to be powerful just because it's the
best way to survive in the international system. It's the way to maximize your security. But
hopefully you'll use that power smartly. Although given America's performance in recent decades,
Will There Be a US/China War Over Taiwan?
there's not a lot of cause for hope. Do we wind up in a war with China over Taiwan? Uh I think
it's possible. Uh I don't think it's likely in the foreseeable future. Uh the problem is it's
an incredibly difficult military operation for the Chinese because it involves an amphibious assault.
They have to go across the Taiwan straight which is a large body of water and amphibious assaults
are very difficult and in all likelihood the Americans will come to the aid of the Taiwanese.
Uh the other thing is the Taiwan I mean the Chinese unlike the Americans don't fight wars
all the time. The last time China fought a war was in 1979. Just think about that. 1979 in Vietnam.
Yeah. Where they they were foolish enough to follow in our footsteps. Y and we were foolish
enough to follow in the French footsteps and go in there. So they went in in 79 and got whacked.
But they've not fought a war since then. So, they don't have a highly trained uh military that has
lots of combat experience that would be capable of launching one of the most difficult military
operations imaginable, which is an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait into the face
of resistance from not only the Taiwanese but the Americans. So, I think that uh will keep a
lid on things for the foreseeable future. I don't think the Chinese uh will attack. I think uh that
what they'll wait for is uh the right moment. Uh hope that the world changes in ways that makes it
feasible for them to do it. They're good at waiting. They're good at waiting. That is I I think that's true. So I I don't think and I want to underline I'm using the word think. Uh
the other point just very quickly, we do live in a nuclear world and we have nuclear weapons and they
have nuclear weapons and the incentive for them to avoid a war with the United States and for us to
avoid a war with them because of nuclear weapons is very great. So that may really put a damper
on things if we ever get into a serious crisis. Professor, thank you for spending all this time.
That was wonderful. It's my pleasure, Tucker. Thanks very much for having me on the show.
Thank you uh for doing this and congratulations on being vindicated after all these years. That
must be nice. Whether you admit it or not, you have been. So, thank you. I'm going to plead the fifth amendment. Thank you again. [Music] So, it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
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