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Nov. 11, 2025 - The David Knight Show
03:10:56
The David Knight Show - 11/11/2025
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In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
Welcome to
this Tuesday, November 11th edition of the David Knight SHOW.
Today is going to be a best of compilation rebroadcast.
My family got some very tragic news.
My mom's twin brother, my uncle, very suddenly passed away.
It was completely unexpected, but to allay your fears, he did not get the vaccine, so it has nothing to do with that.
I want to ask that you please pray for my mom.
As I said, he was her twin brother, and they were very, very close.
They spoke every single day.
And so it is especially hard on her.
Keep our family in your prayers, but especially her.
Keith did a lot for the show.
He was the one that did most of the backgrounds that you see on it, and many other things as well.
He was a big help to the show on top of just being a fantastic uncle.
So now we're going to go to the rebroadcast.
The best of.
Can't thank you all enough.
Welcome back.
And I want to begin with a couple of statements from people about this book.
The book is FDR: A New Political Life.
The author is David Beto.
And this first one that's here is from Hillsdale College.
It's Burton Folsom.
He says the book FDR, a new political life, is the most illuminating one-volume history of FDR ever written.
American historians have come to recognize that Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression, but prolonged it.
David Beto carefully explains why so many FDR programs and power grabs were so counterproductive.
To go from the older FDR histories to David Beteau's wonderful new work is to make a historic leap from the Dark Ages.
Also, another author, David McCallis, says, when it comes to race and Western influence, FDR's vision of the world order was muddled by delusional phenomena.
He was not a man of empire or genocide like his wartime allies, Churchill and Stalin, but he was a dreadfully old-fashioned Victorian quack, an amateur phrenologist who believed that repopulating the Pacific Rim with certain choice cross-breeding would create a better world for all.
David Beto takes us further than his predecessors along the breadcrumb path into Franklin Roosevelt's thick forested interior.
And again, many wonderful stellar reviews.
And I got to say, even though I wasn't able to read the entire book, what I read of it really does match with this.
I'll give you one more.
This is from Jim Bovart, who we've interviewed on this show many times.
He said historian David Beto, who previously exposed how President Franklin Roosevelt ravaged Americans' constitutional rights, is back with a new book vividly exposing his personal perfidy from the dawn of Woodrow Wilson administration to 1945, the betrayal at Yalta and Beyond.
With volleys of research, Beto demolishes Roosevelt's reputation as one of the quote-unquote great presidents.
And so I look at FDR like Lincoln.
These are presidents who come in at a time of great societal upheaval and change and war, and they have an active role in redefining our society.
I think we're in a time like that right now.
This is a guy who ran as a peace candidate, but then turned to war.
He was there at the center of the fight between gold and fiat currency.
He was preside over rapid expansion of Leviathan federal government with very creative excuses to override the Constitution.
He instituted surveillance, and there was a free speech revolt against him.
He also weaponized the FCC.
And we can see, you know, we've talked about what was going on with the FCC.
We pointed out that why should broadcast media have its content controlled when they don't control the press?
Well, you can look to FDR for that.
So joining us now is David Beto.
Thank you so much for joining us.
This excellent book here that you have.
Thank you so much.
You know, Steve, you brought up the, I mean, if you don't mind the FCC issue.
And it brought to mind the contrast between FDR and Trump.
You know, Trump makes these wild threats about involving the FCC.
He goes public with it.
He tries to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, which really wasn't worth the effort, frankly.
And he succeeds short term, but now Kimball is back on the air.
So Trump looks silly.
What FDR did is he did it behind the scenes.
He did it carefully.
He would never make a public statement like that.
He went to the sponsors of, for example, there was a leading anti-New Deal radio commentator named Boke Carter in 1938, one of the top-rated commentators in the country on CBS.
And so how did Roosevelt get him off the air?
He did open an IRS investigation, an immigration investigation, because Carter was from Canada.
And then finally, he went to the executives.
He went to the sponsors, including Marjorie Merriweather Post, who sold, at least she was the original owner of Mar-a-Lago.
And she used her influence, and Carter was forced off the air.
And by the end of 1938, all anti-New Deal commentators on the main networks were off the air.
And despite the fact that most newspapers were hostile to FDR, he did it all quietly.
He did it all behind the scenes with a scalpel, where, you know, Trump used the blunt edge of the sword.
And maybe in many ways, we should be thankful for that.
That Trump is like a bull in a china shop so often.
And sometimes when he doesn't need to get his way, he doesn't get his way because he's so, I don't know, obvious about it.
Yeah, maybe his real thing is more about getting Americans divided and fighting each other than it is about the actual reform.
But what FDR did is something that we've seen a pattern of people in government typically doing, and that is working behind the scenes, quietly sending out messages to make sure that this group or that group is shadow banned or canceled.
And you can use your own judgment in terms of doing this because you're a private corporation and you can do that.
But of course, he kind of did that with in terms of telegrams and things.
Not the social media side, of course, but actual physical telegrams.
FDR had his involvement with that as well.
And they see the early trends of the surveillance state.
The technology has changed, but the nature of men in power hasn't really changed that much.
Talk a little bit about the Black Inquisition and things that were involved in that.
Okay.
Well, the Black Committee was a Senate committee.
It was headed by Senator Hugo Black, who later ended up on the U.S. Supreme Court despite his Klan background.
And Black was an attack dog for the New Deal.
He was really Roosevelt's main ally, I would say, in the Congress.
He was the to-go-to guy.
Well, Roosevelt wanted an investigation of anti-New Deal organizations.
And Black was more than happy to cooperate in this.
So Black would call in these witnesses and they would, you know, sometimes successfully hold him off.
He would bring in leading anti-New Deal figures.
And so Black got the bright idea, or someone got the bright idea.
Well, why don't I get their private telegrams?
Telegrams were the emails, texts of the time.
They were over half of long-distance communication.
People would say things in telegrams that they wouldn't say in letters, but they would say now on an email or a text.
And there were thousands of them.
They were instantaneous, virtually instantaneous.
So Black goes to Western Union and the other telegraph companies and said, I want copies of all telegrams sent to and from members of Congress, and he had other people as well, for like a six-months period.
And Western Union's response was, are you kidding?
You know, our customers would hate that.
And Black goes to the FCC, gets approval.
And of course, FDR would have had a hand in this.
Although, again, he didn't really have to order Black to do anything because Black was serving the New Deal and got FCC approval.
So, again, it's FCC because...
The Telegraph companies were ordered to provide, that was one example.
It's, you know, millions of telegrams, but then they expanded, Black expanded the investigation to include other cities, targeted individuals, and so forth.
So he went in there with his staffers into Western Union, and they had to keep copies of telegrams, right?
That was sort of part of their requirement.
And they got big staffers went through them.
Sorry, that was a government requirement to keep the copies in the first place?
Yes.
Well, I think the telegraph companies maybe would have kept their own copies anyway.
I don't know.
But they were required to keep copies of all telegrams.
And they went through millions.
And I couldn't believe this when I saw it.
But yes, that was true.
They went through about 10,000 a day over a very long period of time.
And the committee staffers had instructions to don't look at anything of a personal nature.
Just look at material related to lobbying.
What would be lobbying?
Well, the committee had a specific definition.
Indirect or direct lobbying.
Indirect lobbying would be any attempt to influence public opinion.
So our conversation would be an example of that.
So any attempt to influence public opinion would be considered lobbying.
So they went through, copied selectively, and they would ambush witnesses because this was all secret.
None of the witnesses knew they were doing this.
None of them knew.
And eventually it came out because Western Union informed, started to inform people who were being targeted.
And one of them sued very prominent law firm in Chicago, still there.
Silas Strahn was his name.
And Strawn was a heavyweight.
And one in federal district court, by that time, Black had done his damage and he said, well, we're done with our investigation.
However, this was a very good precedent for the future.
Now, of course, Black could use the telegrams that he'd gotten, his illegal booty, but he couldn't do any more of this kind of search, nor could official future congressional committees.
Very important precedent, but it's not very well known.
It was a federal court judge.
Yeah, we usually think about what's going on with FISA and everything.
And that came after World War II because with the creation of the CIA and NSA, they started getting information from the phone company, getting PIN information.
Who did they call and that type of thing, which they could infer a lot from.
But actually, this predates all of that.
Were they using this as you said, they were questioning people?
Did they use this information as a perjury trap for people?
Ask them a question that they already knew the answer to.
I suspect that that kind of thing went on.
I haven't come across it.
I have reason to believe from just reading some of Roosevelt's comments that he was, you know, this information was shared with him, but I can't prove it.
But I think it was used for all sorts of nefarious reasons.
See, historians have kind of looked in the wrong place.
They've looked at people like J. Edgar Hoover, who, again, there's a lot of things he did too.
But the mass surveillance, this is a better example of mass surveillance, but people haven't looked at it.
In fact, I hadn't even heard of the Black Committee until about 12 years ago when I was doing research and I came across it.
I said, what's this thing?
The Black Committee?
What's that?
Is that describing the nature of the committee?
Yeah.
It was a Senate committee.
It was forgotten.
Not by a lot of conservatives, though.
Conservatives would be bringing it up in the 1950s.
And that's part of the reason why McCarthyism came about, because they were pissed.
And they thought, well, you guys are now complaining about civil liberties.
What about the Black Committee?
That's a parallel to today as well, isn't it?
You know, when you suffer an injustice like that, you feel entitled to propagate it against your enemies again.
You know, so wait, you guys did it.
So what about that?
Let's do it again.
I love the title that you got.
Sedition trials.
Probably Trump's going to do sedition trials, I would guess, right?
That's right.
The same thing the J6 people were convicted of.
Stupid law that should have been repealed.
Exactly.
Or at least severely limited.
I like the way that you've got it here in your book, The Black Inquisition.
That really does get your attention as you're looking at it.
It's like, oh, okay, you got critics.
Yeah.
The Black Inquisition.
And then there was a pushback against that.
Part of it was William Randolph Hearst was, of course, targeted at that because I guess I could say, well, anything that he says is going to be influencing public opinion, obviously.
So let's get all of his telegrams.
And so he actually, you have a chapter here, The Right and the Left Free Speech Coalition.
So there's a pushback with that.
He joined with the ACLU left as William Randolph Hearst pushing back those.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah.
Well, the Black Committee had gotten a treasure trove of Hearst-related telegrams.
But they did a very stupid thing.
They did a public subpoena.
None of this was subpoenaed, by the way.
But they did a public subpoena of one and only one telegram that they probably already had.
And this telegram was where Hearst was accusing this prominent member of Congress, a committee chair, of being in league with the communists.
It was kind of a hyperbolic telegram.
And I guess what the black committee, what black thought was, people just see that as so over the top, this will be good PR for us.
But instead, what happened is other members of Congress, like, you know, a guy named McCormack, who was future Speaker of the House, a guy named Emmanuel Seller.
These are New Dealers.
They say this is uncalled for.
This is the tactics of Mussolini.
So it actually backfired on Roosevelt.
Even many of his own New Deal supporters were against this.
And this is very interesting and very discouraging in some ways because during this period, you had a lot of civil libertarians on the left who were willing, even though they liked Roosevelt, who were willing to push back against him.
And that is not as true today.
Maybe that will change now, but it's not.
It certainly hasn't been true today.
Well, today we're so much more partisan and tribal, and we don't seem to care about principles.
We don't seem to care about the rule of law.
And that's true of both sides, isn't it?
Well, yeah, it's the people at the time give you a sense of the difference.
H.L. Mencken was an in-your-face kind of anti-New Dealer, civil libertarian, you know, I don't know, agnostic.
He alienated everybody, but he was friends with everybody.
He had correspondence that spanned the political spectrum.
He was respected.
He was liked as an individual, could talk to people.
I don't think there are as many people who fit in that category today.
That's right.
Yeah, he was a real clever wit.
I mentioned frequently his thing.
A year ago, if I had a gold coin and a flask of whiskey, the whiskey was illegal and the coin was legal.
This year, the gold coin is illegal and the flask of whiskey is legal.
So, yeah, he was always pointing out the absurdity of FDR, yeah.
So I think one of the very telling things about FDR was the war and peace issue.
And you got in here part of his speech, which truly is amazing that he makes when he's running as a candidate, as a peace candidate.
He says, I've seen war.
I've seen war on land and sea.
I have seen blood running from the wounded.
I've seen men coughing out their gassed lungs.
I've seen the dead in the mud.
I've seen cities destroyed.
I've seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of the survivors of the regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before.
I have seen children starving.
I've seen the agony of mothers and wives.
I hate war.
And you write, as he so often did, FDR exaggerated his exposure to the fighting in World War I was limited and sanitized.
While the Navy had sent him on a guided inspection of American naval and marine bases in Europe, the main impression conveyed by his contemporaneous diary account was that of a sightseer.
So talk a little bit about that, how he ran as a peace candidate, and then he flipped, pushing us into war.
Well, FDR was playing both sides of the street.
For example, in the 1930s, he had been the guy to suggest, well, maybe we need neutrality laws.
And then later, he pushed for repeal of the Neutrality Act, saying, I wish I'd never signed it.
He never mentioned that he was the guy that helped to inspire it in the first place.
So he was a rabid interventionist when he was assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson.
He was constantly trying to imitate his cousin Theodore and get some sort of incident, possibly.
So he was a hawk.
But then in the 30s, he sort of realizes there's all this anti-war feeling and he appeals to that.
He actually applauds the Munich Agreement.
But then after that, he becomes much more of an interventionist and certainly aligns himself with Winston Churchill and so forth.
But a lot of this is done quietly.
So he's sort of playing both sides of the street.
And he is in trouble in the 1940 election.
His opponent, Wendell Willkie, who was kind of an interventionist too, but starts talking like an America firster during the last part of the campaign, is making inroads.
So FDR is worried about this.
So very shortly before the election, he gives this speech.
He'd never given a speech this strong, where he says, I've said this before, and I'll say it again and again and again.
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.
Full stop, right?
And Wendell Willkie heard that on the radio, and he said, that hypocritical son of a bitch has just lost me the election.
And whether or not that was true or not, FDR was, that was a clear motivation.
His son went up to him and said, Dad, why did you say that?
You've never said anything like that before.
And he said, basically, well, I had to win, you know, for the good of the country.
That kind of thing.
So just a moral, an amoral figure.
Maybe worse in so many ways.
A very cynical, jaded man, I think.
Who had great charm.
Yes.
But I never really cared for him.
I'm going to confess.
Did you ever see that movie Sunrise at Campobello?
No, I never saw that.
Oh, it was a movie made in the 50s starring Rolf Bellamy playing FDR in his battle against polio.
And I just, you know, Bellamy captured FDR in some ways.
It was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal.
But there was just this charm, which always seemed a little bit phony to me.
Yeah.
And very calculating, but very effective.
Yeah, he seemed that way to me as well.
But I always kind of just dismissed that as, you know, when you look at movies at the time, you know, people came across as very stiff and pretentious and, you know, putting on airs.
That's kind of the way that a lot of people would come across, even in the movies at that time.
They wouldn't come across as genuine or and so I kind of just put it up to the zeitgeist of the time, if you will.
But yeah, it's interesting.
And you began with his rise to power.
Talk a little bit about that.
Where'd this guy come from?
He had a big advantage in that he was born into comfortable circumstances.
Not super wealth, but wealth.
He was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and very distant, like seventh cousin, but the family had contacts with each other and so forth.
And he went, he did the typical trajectory of someone in that class.
He went to Groton, a very exclusive private school.
Then he went to Harvard.
He got a Columbia, his law degree from Columbia.
He had very mediocre grades.
He was not a good student, but he was a gladhander.
People liked him.
He made his impact socially.
And then it was some people approached him and said, Mr. Roosevelt, we'd like you to run for Congress, or not for Congress, for a state legislature in New York.
You know, Theodore was president at the time.
They happened to be Democrats.
I guess they thought that that was a brilliant move.
Now, I say that if the Republicans had approached Franklin, he probably would have run as a Republican.
In fact, he had supported his cousin very openly when his cousin ran for re-election.
His first vote was for Theodore.
But the Democrats asked him.
It was a good Democratic year, 1908.
So he ran as a Democrat and he was able to win.
And from there, he just impressed people.
He got the attention of a guy named Josephus Daniels, who was Secretary of the Navy, quite a racist, southern racist type.
But Daniels was charmed by Roosevelt.
He had a very apt comment.
He said, he was just like an actress.
He had that.
He had it, right?
And someone had said it was a case of love at first sight, you know, when Daniels saw him.
And I don't think anything went on, but he made him assistant secretary of Navy.
And from there, Roosevelt was imitating his cousin, either intentionally or by chance.
Theodore had been in the legislature.
Theodore had been assistant secretary of the Navy.
And then Theodore was vice presidential candidate, as Roosevelt was in 1920.
So there are very similarity, a lot of parallels between them.
One difference, though, Franklin did not volunteer to fight in World War I.
He was in his late 30s.
He could have.
His cousin Theodore said, you have to get into the infantry, not just the Navy.
You have to get into the infantry.
You have to get in the fight.
And Roosevelt came back and said, well, my boss thinks I'm essential.
And maybe his boss did say that.
But Theodore had a similar boss.
He didn't have to go in.
But Franklin was not the man that Theodore was.
And so he did not serve in the military.
So at that point, he was able-bodied.
At that point, he was able-bodied and could have.
Yeah, that was before his bout of polio, which was 196 right here, 1921.
He was about how old when that happened.
He was about 39, quite a young man.
And there's an interesting story there.
Now, a lot of people said, can't you say something good about Roosevelt?
I will say that, you know, he showed great determination.
Of course, he had a lot of help.
He had a lot of doctors.
He had a lot of leisure time.
He had a lot of support.
But he showed great courage in overcoming that.
Part of the story that I was surprised by is who did he blame for the polio?
He blamed a Republican senator.
And the story on this is really fascinating.
I began my book with it.
There was an investigation.
Well, there was something called the Newport scandal, the Newport sex scandal.
Do you recall reading that?
Yeah, no, I skipped over to the Black Inquisition.
What happened was Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and there was a guy at one of the naval bases in Newport who was investigating whether there were same-sex relationships going on in the Navy and thought this was a major scandal and so forth.
And even did his own private investigations where this guy would find people to go in and they would actually have sex with these men to try to entrap them.
So Roosevelt found out about this.
The investigation was basically had no funding.
The Secretary of War had refused to back it.
I mean, the Attorney General had refused to back it.
And Roosevelt stepped in single-handedly and set up an investigative unit headed by him called Section A in the Department of Navy, which investigated this issue of same-sex relationships in the Navy.
And they would send out investigators who, again, would entrap people by having sex with them.
And Roosevelt, I think, quite clearly knew what was going on.
A local journalist in Newport pushed back on this and accused Roosevelt of doing this.
And Roosevelt basically responded, said, well, you know, isn't it important to find what's going on here?
Why are we so worried about procedure?
And it was actually controversial.
You would think this period was very anti-gay, and it was.
But people in Congress and the press thought this was abhorrent.
These tactics were beyond the pale.
So that's one of the things that we've lost.
He did his best to cover it up.
And it weakened.
It put so much tension on him that he said that it had lowered his resistance and made him more susceptible to the outbreak of polio, which may have been true, actually, because it was a lot of us contaminated water.
But again, if your immunity, you know, if you had low resistance and so forth.
So he blamed this senator.
Until his dying day for causing his polio.
Well, you know what you're talking about.
Because of this Newport investigation, which almost derailed his career, almost destroyed him.
He was lucky.
It's the tactic that's involved there.
And people don't know.
Everybody did.
And you would think this would be a period where they would say, oh, they're gay.
We need to root them out.
They may have thought that, but this is beyond the pale.
And of course, these people that had been destroyed, many of them were innocent, they didn't get any benefits, right?
They didn't get military funerals.
They were destroyed.
And Roosevelt is able to ride through it, partly because other things go on that divert public attention.
But the New York Times, as a matter of fact, has a big story where it calls his behavior, They blame him for it.
The Times blames him in this article and basically, you know, comes to the conclusion he's unfit for office.
But he's able to escape this somehow because of other things going on.
And it's forgotten.
And most people today don't even know about it.
But it's quite an important, it's quite an important story in his life.
Well, it reveals his character, which we then saw later when he's coming after political.
Roosevelt was quite clear that he wasn't worried about the means.
It was the end.
Get something done.
This is his view towards civil liberties.
These people need to be shut up.
Yeah, I think there's some way to shut them up.
That was a real harm.
That was a real hallmark of everything that he did.
He doesn't care.
I think he was always kind of a default interventionist.
And I think a lot, you know, I mean, I think he did have an ideology.
And I think he had been a Wilsonian interventionist.
He was a great admirer of Wilson, right?
He defended Wilson when he ran for president in 1920, even though much of the public was sick of Wilson.
He defended the worst aspect, the most repressive aspects of Wilsonianism.
So I think that was his default position.
That's the best way I could explain it.
I think the relationship with Churchill made a difference, but I think you see even signs of that before that, where he's trying to do it.
His focus is on the North Atlantic.
By 1941, he is desperately trying to provoke an incident in the North Atlantic.
And he builds up minor incidents into cause celebs and is trying to get into the war.
It's clear he wants to do that by 1941 by any means that he can.
But the public is hostile to the idea.
Overwhelmingly, the public does not want to get into another foreign war.
They remember World War I.
They do not want to do that again.
But he's able to get aid to Britain through Lend-A-Lease, which was very open-ended.
But again, selling this is, well, of course, we won't have to go in.
We can help the British, right?
Give them the tools and they will finish the fight, as people used to say.
And that kind of thing.
Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, right?
Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we can just give them the weapons and we won't really get involved.
But the Germans aren't taking the bait to the extent that he wants them to.
So he kind of shifts to the Pacific, right?
And there's massive sanctions against the Japanese that preceded Pearl Harbor.
And of course, what do you have about Pearl Harbor?
What's your take on Pearl Harbor?
Did he engineer that and keep things secret there in a kind of subversive way?
What is your opinion on that?
Okay, yeah, again, his focus is the North Atlantic, but he eventually comes to the conclusion: well, you know, if we're going to go to war with Japan, that's fine with me.
And maybe we can get into the European war as well.
I don't think, I think that that's part of what he's pushing.
And really, since there were opportunities to have a peace agreement with Japan, the Japanese prime minister offers to meet with Roosevelt in the middle of the Pacific to have a summit.
So let's hash this out.
Roosevelt doesn't take the opportunity.
At one point, the Japanese actually say that they were willing to evacuate China.
He doesn't take the opportunity.
So they're sort of a distraction.
Now, okay, Pearl Harbor.
Did Roosevelt know about it?
I don't think he did.
And my argument for that is, I think the best evidence is that they did know that Japanese would attack.
They thought the attack would probably be somewhere like the Philippines, maybe in Singapore, somewhere like that.
They did not think it would be Pearl Harbor.
Very few people thought that.
Almost nobody thought that.
And part of the reason they didn't think that is they didn't think the Japanese were capable.
They didn't think they were good pilots.
They didn't think that they could pull something out like that.
And even the commanders on the ground, and Roosevelt did shortchange them, short and Kimmel there at the Pacific.
They wanted observation planes, but Roosevelt diverted all resources to the North Atlantic.
They wanted, you know, if they had had those observation planes, for example, it might have made all the difference.
He shortchanged them.
But even they thought that the main danger from the Japanese was sabotage.
That's one of the reasons why they put the planes in the middle of the field in many cases.
It made them more vulnerable to attack, but theoretically, less vulnerable to sabotage.
So what is Roosevelt's first reaction after the attack?
Well, it's from a butler who saw him, and Roosevelt's response was, I will go down in disgrace.
He thinks, my God, I didn't expect this.
I'm going to be in trouble because of this.
So I don't think they knew that the attack was going to be at Pearl Harbor, partly because they underestimated the Japanese.
I think Roosevelt was reckless, however, that he knew an attack was going to come.
I think he could have done much more to warn naval commanders throughout the Pacific that an attack was going to come.
There were clues that it could have come at Pearl Harbor, namely the time of day.
They did know that the time of the day when the Japanese were going to in the embassy had been ordered American embassy to destroy their codes.
And that was at 7.30 a.m., which would have been a very good time for an attack on Pearl Harbor.
And they didn't put two and two together.
So I think it's more incompetence, but I don't buy the theory that has been put forward by people like Stinnett, who makes this argument that we knew that the Japanese fleet was on the way and so forth.
I don't see the evidence for that.
We did break one of the codes, but we didn't break the crucial naval code, broke the diplomatic code.
So we knew a lot of what was going on.
Roosevelt knew a lot about it.
He was reading a lot of Japanese mail.
And maybe they could have put two and two together, but I think it was sort of racism in some sense.
They just didn't think the Japanese could pull something like this off.
You know, they sounded bad, didn't they?
Well, talk a little bit about it.
You got to have that issue, and I'd be happy to talk with people about it.
But I don't buy that, that he knew that it was going to happen at Pearl Harbor.
Sure.
Well, talk about fear and emergency.
Okay.
Well, when Roosevelt ran in 1940, 1932, he pledged to maintain sound money.
Now, he didn't exactly say, well, gold, but Huber didn't either.
But he also gave a speech right before the election called a little-known speech called the Covenant Speech, where he would talk about gold contracts, the covenant, right?
He said he would uphold the covenant.
Basically, I will uphold the use of gold, right?
Then very shortly after the election, he makes a decision to go off the gold standard.
calls in his Secretary of the Treasury, who's much more, actually Secretary of State, who's much more conservative than him on financial issues, Cordell Hall.
And he says, Cordell, congratulate me.
We're going off the gold standard tomorrow.
And he pulls out some money.
And it was a money that was issued by the, whatever, the Federal Reserve Bank of Tennessee, I guess.
He said, this is from Tennessee, your own state, Cordell.
And what makes this money good?
It's only good because we say it's good.
And again, that is what he did.
Then he does a lot of crazy things after that.
He does a program to purchase gold.
And he sets the price, no, not to purchase gold, but to set the price of gold.
So he said he has this gold buying program.
And how does he determine the price?
He determines it from things like, he says, well, I think the price should be 19 cents today because it's a lucky number.
You know, he would say things like that.
And Roosevelt was very superstitious.
He had lucky shoes.
He had lucky hats.
So this is not as strange as you might seem.
And it was just a crazy, crazy town.
But what saved us in terms of financially in the 30s was we had massive gold imports from both Europe and the Soviet Union, where people are taking their gold for obvious reasons out of those places and bringing it to the United States.
So we have a tremendous gold inflow to the United States through those sort of happy, not happy, tragic accidents, I guess you could say, both from Russia and from, because Stalin is buying a lot of American goods using gold.
That's part of it.
And of course, the gold is coming in from Germany because Jews and others are taking their gold out.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, when you look at how he was reacting, how he had his lucky shoes and all the rest of the stuff, and how arbitrary things were, that sounds very familiar too in a disturbing way, doesn't it?
You know, kind of erratic and arbitrary, capricious, what he's doing with these things.
We're starting to see a lot of that.
That's a good word.
Parallels with Trump, but there are big differences too.
But, you know, I think there's some parallels that you can draw.
So talk a little bit about the end of prohibition.
That's one of the things everybody, you know, Happy Days is here again.
How much of that was, you know, did he build that up for his campaign and how much of that was really an initiative of his?
Or was it just that people had had it with alcohol prohibition?
At that point, he got ahead of that.
Was he opposed on that by the Republicans?
Or what was the situation with the prohibition?
And I don't discuss prohibition a lot, but Roosevelt was a straddler.
He wasn't going to take controversial positions.
He was also a straddler on trade issues and tariff issues.
So he was not a leader of the anti-prohibition forces.
There were Democrats who were.
The more conservative Democrats, interestingly, tended to be the more anti-prohibition.
And there was a big element in the party.
And people were sick and tired of the prohibition laws by 1932.
The Republicans chose to kind of avoid the issue.
So Roosevelt getting the nomination, it certainly was a popular position, but he also recognized that this is a popular position.
And he came out for repeal of the Constitutional Amendment, bringing in prohibition.
He took a very strong stand.
I think there were other motivations, though.
One was it's a great tax source.
And as a matter of fact, during the early New Deal, even though they're talking about income taxes, most of the tax collections are from excise taxes.
People like things like cosmetics, cigarettes, alcohol.
That's where the bulk of the revenue is raised.
So Roosevelt is raising the tax top rate to, I don't know, eventually it gets well over 90%, but it's going way, way up.
He makes a big deal about this, but that means that the wealthy find ways to find tax shelters.
They don't pay it.
So where does the actual money come?
It comes from the nickels and dimes of people going to movies.
There's a tax on movie tickets.
It comes from the nickels and dimes of working class people.
But Roosevelt is very clever in never acknowledging that.
And of course, the excise taxes on liquor as well.
I always think is maybe in the back of his mind, too.
And he uses that revenue source in a major way.
It's always soak the rich, and then it's always the poor and middle class that pay all the taxes.
That's another thing that never stops.
That's a dark example of that.
Another thing that never stops.
And of course, the revenuers, you know, that's what they called the people that were coming after the stills in the mountains and everything, because that was really what they wanted.
They wanted the money that was there.
So talk a little bit about the Supreme Court packing issue as well and his fight to essentially just completely rewrite the Constitution.
We look at what happened with the New Deal.
Should be called the New Constitution.
Roosevelt proposes, he keeps his quiet again, but then in 1937, he's all puffed up because the 1936 election was one of the more spectacular landslides in American history.
Partly because Roosevelt was very effective in using New Deal money, targeted money.
And I could talk about that as well, how he was able to win such a big majority.
But he thought, I'm going to get a third New Deal, right?
He wanted to be more radical.
He wanted to do more.
But he thought, what good will that do if the Supreme Court, which has been striking down measures like the AAA and the National Recovery Administration, what good will all my effort be unless I get a sympathetic court?
Okay.
Well, he decides, he proposes to increase the size of the court.
And he gives a speech where he basically says they're overextended.
They're old.
They're tired.
I want to help them.
They've got a big workload.
Well, he gives a speech and he wants to increase the size of the court.
And he obviously thinks he can pull it off because, I don't know, you're talking about something like, gee, whiz, the Republicans are down to like 16, 20 senators.
I mean, he's got an overwhelming majority.
You would think that he could pull this off easily.
And he's so disingenuous.
And it's so obvious what he's doing that there is a big movement against court packing led by a New Dealer, Senator Burton Wheeler, who'd been an ally of Roosevelt and turns against him.
And Wheeler is the ideal guy to lead this effort.
The Republicans are very smart.
They lay back and let the Democrats take leadership.
And they do.
Now, the campaign is very grueling.
And it becomes clear during the campaign that Roosevelt is essentially won.
Because one of the justices on the court has switched sides.
And it's clear that he's probably going to get all of his New Deal programs sustained.
But he keeps pushing on.
I guess it becomes a matter of principle for him.
He keeps pushing on.
He pushes, pushes, pushes.
The majority leader of the Senate is exhausted.
He is in bad shape, and he ends up having a heart attack and is found with a copy of the congressional record in his hand.
His name is Joe Robinson.
And Roosevelt doesn't go to Robinson's funeral.
And there's a lot of controversy about that.
Why don't you go to the guy's funeral?
Probably because he was pissed off that Robinson wasn't doing a better job.
Anybody says, well, he would understand.
He had to fight for the, and it hurts Roosevelt no end.
And Roosevelt is defeated.
So in a lot of ways, that is an example of a left-right coalition.
There are many examples, but that's one.
He's defeated by Democrats.
Could you imagine that happening under Biden?
I would find it difficult to imagine that.
Or Franklin under Trump in the opposite direction.
That's right.
But it did happen then, which says something positive about Americans during that period.
Americans in Congress included.
That's right.
Much higher level of character in a lot of ways.
And I've mentioned many times about the fact, you know, we have our war on drugs that's been going on for over half a century, but we had the 18th and the 21st Amendment, which said that they had enough respect for the Constitution that everybody had a constitutional amendment to stop in order to start it and then stop the alcohol prohibition because they knew that they didn't have that power in the Constitution.
But today, we don't care about that.
We just do whatever we wish.
I think it's kind of interesting.
Everybody agreed on that.
We have to have a constitutional amendment.
That's right.
It's one of the biggest arguments against the war on drugs, I think, is the fact that we have those two amendments that are there.
But when you go back and you look at this particular case with the Supreme Court, the fact that he's got the votes, but he still wants to press on with this thing because it's a matter of personal prestige and power, I think.
The same type of thing that we see with Trump.
And yet, does he take the kind of vengeance against people who go against him and kind of a vendetta that we see Trump taking against Republicans, let's say?
He doesn't attend the guy's funeral or whatever, but it gives him the cold shoulder.
But did he really go after people like Trump and go after somebody like Thomas Massey who opposes him on his agenda?
Yeah, again.
He keeps a secret.
He's a deniability.
And this is what's interesting.
There is an investigation under another loyalist.
In fact, he'd been offered the position on the Supreme Court before Black, but wanted to stay in Congress.
His name was Senator Sherman Mitten.
And if you search his name, the thing that usually comes up is there's a bridge named after him.
But now maybe that'll change.
But Mitten was a very young guy.
He was already in the Senate leadership, first termer, and he was very tight with Roosevelt.
And Mitten starts his own investigation.
Basically, he succeeds the Black Committee.
It's the same committee.
But Black is now in the U.S. Supreme Court.
And so Mitten heads this investigation.
They can't search telegrams anymore, but one of the things they do do is they use Mitten gets permission to look at the IRS tax records of people he targets, for example.
He gets that.
But Mitten gets very frustrated because there's a lot of putback, pushback.
People are very upset about his methods.
And he lacks black subtlety.
Black had some subtlety.
Mitten is just charging forward.
And so Mitten gives this speech.
He said, well, we need a law against these big newspapers because most of the press was against Roosevelt.
So he said, let's make it a felony to publish anything known to be untrue, fake news, basically.
In fact, they use that term, I think.
False news or fake news.
And he proposes this bill.
And what is the reaction to the bill?
Almost universal opposition sets in almost from the beginning.
As it is setting in, Roosevelt is asked about the Mitten bill at a news conference.
And I think Roosevelt was the guy that had the idea.
I think he put Mitten up to it.
I can't prove that, but I think it's true.
Because Mitten was not the kind of guy to go off on his own.
And it reflects what Roosevelt thought of the press.
He was asked about this, and he said, well, you know, if we had such a bill, we wouldn't even have enough room in the federal prison system to hold all the prisoners.
And he gets a little laugh, right?
And then as he moves on to a new topic, and I wish they'd done follow-ups.
They didn't.
He says, you boys asked for it, you know.
That's what he says.
You boys asked for it, you know, meaning you reporters, you know people, you asked for this.
And then he moves on to the next topic.
And he drops it, right?
Because Mitten ends up dropping it.
And it discredits his investigation, and his investigation is pretty much shut down after that.
So FDR's, those two years after the 1936 election are a low point for FDR.
There's pushback against him.
He loses court packing.
The Mitten committee collapses.
And he puts all of his attention on court packing.
And as a result, he isn't able to get his radical New Deal program in 1938, 37, 38 that he wanted because he focuses almost entirely on court packing.
And then later, after really it's too late on these investigations.
You know, it's kind of interesting when we look at this period of time, you know, when all the institutions were being reconsidered, reinvented, if you will, and he's fighting against the constitutional pattern that had been accepted, that he was getting pushback, even from his own party, against some of this stuff because as we talked about, people understood the principles.
He had a lot of people who did not share his idea that the end justifies the means.
And we don't see that today.
We're in a much more dangerous situation, I think, when we look at that.
That's why it's good to go back and look at history.
You look at the radical change that was accomplished during the FDR period of time.
And you look at the fact that now we have people on both sides that have become unhinged from or have detached themselves from basic principles about free speech, the rule of law, and having a due process to investigate things like that.
I think we're in a very dangerous time right now.
I think this book helps to get people to understand that if we look at the context, the historical context of this.
Yeah, and we're seeing a lot of people on the right who were talking about free speech and local control, states' rights.
Yeah, turned down a dime.
That's right.
This is very discouraging to see this.
Yeah.
Now they want to come after their idea of fake news.
Now they've got their own fake news vendettas that they want to come after.
So there is so much here.
I mean, we could do several interviews with this.
This is an excellent book.
It is a very important presidency to understand the context of the times in which we live in our government.
And I really highly recommend this book, FDR, A Political Life, by David Beto.
And you spell your name as B-E-I-T-O.
Is that correct?
That's right.
Yeah, so it's not spelled like the Texas politician candidate.
Oh, please, no.
And a lot of people will call him Beto O'Rourke, but I think it's Beto, actually.
Oh, yeah.
I believe that's the way his name is pronounced.
Yeah.
I keep telling people that, even if it isn't true.
That was his nickname.
I think it is true.
Yeah, I used to always call him Robert Francis O'Rourke or whatever his original name was.
I said he's a trans-Hispanic.
He identifies as Hispanic, even though he's not as transparent.
He's always been now.
Let's keep it that way.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, we don't want to resurrect him with any attention, I guess.
But an excellent book, and thank you so much for joining us.
And there is much to learn in terms of politics and history.
It's a very seminal presidency, unfortunately, for many of us who'd like to see a government that follows the Constitution.
FDR's presidency was an unmitigated disaster.
And it bears looking at it and see if we see any repetition in current events as a warning, as a harbinger of what's coming.
Because as we were talking about earlier, you know, this whole stuff of secretly getting information on his enemies, we saw that immediately after World War II ended.
We saw that immediately being transferred over to the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, all these people that are using the income tax to spy on people.
These same tactics are used over and over again.
Thank you very much.
David Beto, the book is FDR, a Political Life.
Thank you, folks, for joining us.
have a good day.
You're listening
to THE David Knight SHOW.
There's been some new, interesting information about the link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
It turns out, and Children's Health Defense has a story, it turns out that some of their scientists have looked at this, and they've produced their own paper in response to the gold standard that has been sold by the medical community and the mainstream media since 2002.
Supposedly, this 2002 study debunked any link between autism and vaccines.
And now these people have looked at this study coming again from the New England Journal of Medicine, the usual suspects.
You can usually count on this kind of garbage coming from them.
They said the question of vaccines and autism desperately needs to be put back on the table.
This is a peer-reviewed research letter by a children's health defense scientist.
Calls into question a 2002 study at the New England Journal of Medicine that officials always use as their strong evidence of no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
A decades-old study, however, does not support rejecting the causal link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, they say in the new stuff.
They said simply math.
And they did the scientific study wrong.
It was done by the usual people.
Like I said, when you look at these studies, any of these studies, the first question you should have is, Cui bono, who benefits from this, right?
And of course, when it's coming out of the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that it's the pharmaceutical industry and the medical communities that are behind this.
The pediatricians are pushing this.
The AMA is pushing this, and they are in bed with the pharmaceutical companies.
Jabolonsky and Hooker called for the study to be replicated after correcting for errors.
They said there's problems with measurements of certainty, contradictions and numbers presented in the studies table, and a flaw in the method used to determine risk.
I wonder if this thing was done by Peter Navarro.
It sounds like his tariffs.
They said a landmark publication in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, whose erroneous conclusions have reverberated through news outlets and doctors' offices alike for the last 23 years, is shown to be invalid by the most basic form of arithmetic.
Do they get anything right about this study is more the question.
I don't know.
I would like to see them go back and revisit the Framingham study, which I've had the doctor that did the surgeries lectured me on that many times to say it proves that you need to have statins.
And it's like, I'm somewhat skeptical of that, which makes me wonder if this is being used so much by the medical community, who funded it and to what purpose.
The problem is not that we were sold $69 billion a year in vaccines based on faulty analyses that riddled our children with toxins, left them in chronic and debilitating disease state, if not death.
The problem is that we bought it.
The New England Journal of Medicine paper by Madsen and others is one of the key studies cited by vaccine advocates to say that it is a myth that there is a link between these vaccisms, these vaccines and autism.
And they did this 23 years ago.
They said there was a lot of mounting evidence showing a link.
And of course, if you just looked at the explosion of autism at that point in time, you knew something was happening.
But again, the report from the reply, I should say, from the mainstream media is this, don't look at this.
They get very upset if anybody talks about doing a study.
It's like, what do you have to hide?
And well, it's all been done.
The science is settled, blah, blah, blah.
Well, if it's scientific, then you should be able to replicate that.
And you shouldn't have a concern about somebody doing another look at that.
They analyzed.
Settled science came from the same group that did the computer model for COVID that showed it going up forever and didn't give the same output twice.
Well, that was the Imperial College of London, but New England Journal of Medicine is just as bad as they are.
They said they looked at 537,000 children in the Danish healthcare system.
They separated them into vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.
The problem was that they didn't normalize this.
They said when they looked at it, they said the risk of autism was the same in both groups.
There was no association with a child's age at the time of vaccination or the time since vaccination or the date of vaccination and the development of autism.
But this study has become a cornerstone publication to say that there is no connection to autism.
But the two people, two scientists from Children's Health Defense, said that the study results as presented show that the authors are 95% confident that the recipients of the MMR vaccine are anywhere from 47% less likely to get autism to 24% more likely to be harmed by the autistic disorder.
Think about that.
Okay, they're nearly 100% confident that they don't have a conclusion here because if you can go anywhere from 47% less likely to 24% more likely to have autism, that is so wide that you can't have any confidence in this study.
Yeah, that's quite a swing.
Imagine somebody comes and says, I've got a great investment for you.
Now, you might be 47% likely to make double your money, or maybe you're 24% likely to lose it all.
I'm not exactly sure.
I don't know how we're doing this, but.
Yeah, they've got confidence that they don't really have a conclusion here.
It doesn't even make sense.
Yeah, they said this is strong evidence of a need for more evidence.
So problems with how the study was conducted, they said, they had also a statistical adjustment.
They used this to correct data to account for biases, confounding factors on limitations in the data.
The authors didn't share their detailed model for the kind of statistical adjustment that they did, which would have been appropriate given that the adjustment changed the safety signal to its opposite.
It changed it from leaning toward harm to leaning toward protection.
So all they do is they come in and wave their hands and say, well, when we initially did this, it looked like it was causing autism, but then we applied a statistical correction, and now it shows that it doesn't.
Well, once I massaged the data.
Yeah, exactly.
Once I made it, so it didn't.
They said the study's authors are confused about the size of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated cohorts.
The number of vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals with autistic disorder and other autism spectrum disorders varies between these tables.
For example, reanalyzing unadjusted data from one of their tables indicated with a 90% confidence that children who received the MMR vaccine had an 18% greater incident of autistic disorder or other autism spectrum disorders.
They said the original Madison paper is foundational to the pharmaceutical industry canard that, quote, vaccines don't cause autism.
However, the numbers literally don't add up.
And you can see how they're massaging the data, and they don't tell you the factors that they've applied here.
They just give you the in conclusion.
There's no science in this.
And folks, this is the whole reason.
This is when you look at what they do with the quote-unquote science of virology about the existence of viruses.
They never do real science on any of these viruses.
They've not isolated them.
They have not isolated something and then exposed a population to it and see the disease develop.
That's never, never been done.
That's why many doctors are saying we no longer believe that in any of this virology stuff.
The study was also done at the beginning of an explosion in autism rates when fewer vaccines were recommended to children and when there were fewer other possible toxic exposures as well.
And so there's yet another lawsuit that has been filed against RFK Jr.'s CDC over the failure to test cumulative effect of a 72-dose childhood vaccine schedule.
Think about that.
Six dozen vaccines.
And what they're saying is you have barely, if you have at all, tested the individual vaccines, but you've never even attempted to test for safety the combined effect of these 72.
And so there's a lawsuit there saying the agency has not done its job.
And of course, the CDC is under HHS.
It's directly under Susan Monarez.
You remember her?
She was put in, first they brought in somebody who was not so friendly to vaccines.
And the industry was not happy with that.
And he was told by the Trump administration when he was on his way to the hearing, don't bother to show up.
We've withdrawn your name.
And they put in, in his place, Susan Monarez, who has been put there from working for BARDA, which is like the biological equivalent of DARPA.
Very dark, very sinister work that they're doing there.
And what she has been focused on at BARDA was artificial intelligence designing mRNA drugs, the very thing that Trump began his administration with, with Stargate, if you recall.
So I looked at this and I thought, well, this is just a, this whole thing was set up from the very beginning.
They put somebody in there that looked like it was going to be a win for skeptics.
Instead, what we wind up with is an AI mRNA person who's going to be there.
Well, she is at the CDC.
So the lawsuit has been.
I was going to say, isn't it funny how that keeps happening with the Trump administration?
Yeah.
Isn't it funny how all these people that are supposed to be on our side, they get in there and immediately switch gears?
Yeah, or they don't get in.
Kash Patel, Dan Bongino.
Funny.
Exactly.
CDC demands proof of harm while refusing to conduct the studies that could provide it.
That is exactly what we see from these people over and over again.
You know, when you've got a natural substance, say, we've got to have some studies or you can't say this or that about it.
But they won't do the studies.
They won't fund those studies.
They don't care.
So they say, well, there's no studies because they don't fund them.
And then they shut it down.
According to the complaint.
If you consider how much of the medical field is about knowing which drugs interact with which ones, it's shocking that they haven't done any studies to see if these 72 vaccines can interact with each other.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
Or to see what the cumulative effect is of all the adjuvants and preservatives and things like that.
Because it's been coming out more and more as time goes on that the babies are just not capable of really clearing these things out of their system, that it accumulates in them at a much higher rate and a faster rate than it would in an adult because they don't have a fully developed system to flush these kinds of chemicals and toxins out.
Well, it's one of these things like the masks, right?
Even if their science were correct in terms of viruses and stuff, then that means that the masks were ludicrously inefficient.
It'd be like a hurricane fence trying to keep out mosquitoes, you know.
But when you look at like the hepatitis B vaccine, which they want to give newborns, it's like, just test the mother and see if she's got hepatitis B. If she doesn't have hepatitis B, you don't need to give that to the baby.
It's ridiculous.
It's truly evil.
Yeah.
According to the complaint, the CDC violated the First Amendment free speech and Fifth Amendment due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, which agency actions are considered to be arbitrary and capricious if they have failed to consider an important aspect of the problem.
Well, I mean, what would we have left of the government if we took out everything that was arbitrary and capricious?
The way much left a government would fit in the Constitution, I guess.
Lawsuit is now asking to force the CDC to study the childhood vaccine schedule and the interactions.
They said the lawsuit is bringing to light critical facts about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, about which most parents are unaware.
The schedule is essentially an experiment on our children, one that becomes increasingly concerning as more shots are added and combination vaccines introduced.
I mean, they added the COVID shot, the mRNA Trump shot, to the childhood schedule.
On Friday last week, HHS announced that it is reinstating the task force on safer childhood vaccines.
The lawsuit describes this as an encouraging small first step, but said that it still does not address the lack of safety testing of the entire vaccine schedule.
They said this case exposes structural failure of the institution.
Now, what it exposes is the fact that these institutions are riddled with corruption, and they are captured by the industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
Individual vaccines undergo limited FDA testing, and neither the FDA nor the CDC has ever required or conducted safety testing of the cumulative childhood schedule that is now 72 doses.
It said to expose the data on harm caused by vaccines would destroy confidence of the program.
The program is more important to them than whether or not it actually helps children.
It's what we were talking about, the iron law of bureaucracy.
and also about corruption for the people that the bureaucracy is actually working for as not the public, but it's working for the people who have created this stuff.
The FDA is there to make sure that they are free to do anything and to give them legal cover to do anything.
Our plaintiffs live the reality of this unproven vaccine recommendation schedule.
It's two doctors who have filed this, two doctors who actually did some science and for publishing these results, they had their licenses taken away.
Thomas lost his pediatric practice after publishing data comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
Stahler had his license revoked for writing medical exemptions based on genetic risk factors.
Doctors who do such research and dare publish it will have the research ultimately retracted even after being published through a rigorous peer review process.
In my case, said Thomas, a few days after this study was available online, the Oregon Medical Board had an emergency meeting, immediately suspended my license, claiming I was a threat to public health.
You notice they don't claim he's lying.
Yeah.
They don't come out and say, you're telling falsehoods.
They just said, you're a threat to public health.
They're right.
Because public health is not about individual health.
It is this nebulous thing that exists for its own benefit in order to dominate us.
And to me, that wording is a tacit admission of, yeah, okay, you're right about this.
Sure, there's a connection here.
However, we're prioritizing what we think is important.
We think that if you were to put this out there, that people would stop getting vaccines and that that would lead to more problematic outcomes for us.
Yes.
Yes.
They don't want people to be able to make an informed decision.
That's right.
Especially parents, because that's the other part of the lawsuit.
They say that it also affects the Fifth Amendment for parents because it deprives parents and children of life, liberty, or property.
And that it denies parents their, quote, fundamental liberty interest in directing their children's medical care and children's fundamental right to bodily integrity.
Because they know that if you confront a pediatrician with this stuff and refuse to do this, the pediatrician is likely to report you to CPS.
And just like the Oregon Medical Board revoked this doctor's license, CPS will come in to try to revoke your parenthood, take your children away from you.
They said this framework denies the existence of medically vulnerable children, while the CDC refuses to recognize any category of vaccine vulnerable children, despite mounting evidence that they exist.
And of course, as we reported last couple weeks, the American Academy of Pediatrics is now engaged in a campaign to remove religious exemptions.
They want to come after the First Amendment for parents as well.
They want to say that you can't refuse to get vaccines because they were the product of an abortion or something like that.
Texas Attorney General is now suing Eli Lilly for bribing doctors to prescribe high-profit drugs.
And of course, Eli Lilly is the giant pharmaceutical company that Trump went to to get the head of HHS for his first term.
That was Alex Cazar, the head, the CEO of Eli Lilly.
He was the one who ran the so-called pandemic.
Now, Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Eli Lilly for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe their most profitable drugs, especially the weight loss medications, but also other prescriptions that were there.
He says that the result of this by getting them to pick the more expensive drugs has resulted in millions of dollars in claims, Medicare claims in Texas that have been made at taxpayer expense.
When you look at what they do, it's the first-hand experience that I had with this Elquist thing.
You know, it's a blood thinner thing to stop blood clots.
And the medical community, they're all just like, oh, yeah, that's the one thing that you use.
You know, they had been so thoroughly propagandized by Pfizer that that's what they sell.
And the doctor said he had a patient who paid thousands of dollars a month to get this blood thinning medication.
And it's like, that's ridiculous.
There's a lot of things out there that can thin your blood.
And not even prescription pharmaceuticals, but that's what they do.
They work with them to say, this is the one that you want.
And look, we've got study here.
So these are the GLP-1 weight loss medications, Manjaro and Zepbound, that are produced by Eli Lilly.
He claims that they are engaged in an illegal kickback scheme.
He said, Eli Lilly fraudulently sought to maximize profits at taxpayer expense and put corporate greed over people's health, just like with the opioid epidemic.
Plaintiffs include the state of Texas and Health Choice Alliance LLC, a New Jersey-based research organization.
In addition to Manjaro and Zepbound, the complaint named a dozen drugs sold by Eli Lilly to treat conditions including migraines, eczema, leukemia, and breast cancer.
Eli Lilly offered illegal incentives to Texas medical providers for prescribing their drugs.
Listen to this, including free nurses.
What is that?
And reimbursement for support services.
Hey, I got a free nurse for you.
How do you manage that?
Just an indentured servant?
Yeah, I guess they take the salary of the nurses.
Eli Lilly in 2023 tested its Manjaro shots on kids as young as six.
This is the GLP-1 drugs, that family of drugs.
Several lesser-known GLP-1 drugs can be prescribed off-label for children, but of course, this hasn't been tested for that.
Texas's new lawsuit follows an October 2024 suit that the state and the Health Choice Alliance filed against major insulin vendors, including Eli Lilly, for overcharging.
And also a kickback scheme.
This seems to be standard operating procedure with pharmaceutical companies, whether you're talking about insulin or whether you're talking about opioids or you're talking about now these weight loss drugs.
And then finally, we have inside mRNA vaccines.
You've got Robert Redfield, who was the CDC director for Trump in his first term.
This guy is coming out now and kind of fessing up.
But from the things that he's saying, he ought to go to jail.
He said, quote, we turned the body into a factory with no clear controls.
And if you go back and look at the archives, I said that publicly when they started talking about that.
If you remember, they had.
You said that almost immediately.
Yeah.
Yeah, they said they went, Trump set up this little dog and pony show, and he had all these pharmaceutical executives come in and sit at the table.
They went around the table, and he had them all lined up in the order of how quickly they could do this.
And he said, no, that's not fast enough.
Next one, that's not fast enough.
And he gets to Moderna and they say, we can do it right now because we're going to use your body as a factory to manufacture this vaccine.
And I said, well, what could possibly go wrong with that?
I said, that sounds like cancer.
How do you ever stop this thing?
And actually, what it reminds me of when I look at this, it reminds me, somebody mentioned it earlier, Fantasia.
It reminds me of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, how appropriate, you know, when you talk about pharmakia, the sorcerers.
This is basically, if you look at these marching brooms with their buckets of water, that's basically what they unleash on you with the mRNA vaccine.
I think this is the perfect analogy for the pharmakea.
You know, it just keeps coming, and that's what the mRNA does.
It keeps multiplying and multiplying in your body as it is damaging your body, flooding your body with spikes, these spike proteins.
Yeah, that's the analogy right there.
And pharma marches on.
Now, Robert Redfield is going to tell us the truth about that finally.
Five years ago, where was he?
Okay, he was in the position to do something about it.
He was the CDC director.
And he wouldn't give you the obvious issue with it.
Hey, we don't have any way to turn this off.
Where's the off switch?
We can't control this.
We just unleash it, right?
We do this pharmake incantation injection, and it's off to the races.
Well, there's probably a lot more money for him to be made being quiet back then.
But now he wants some headlines.
He also wants you to trust him.
So he's out there.
He wants to sell bird flu pandemic, and he's been doing that.
But he's also the guy that's out there saying, oh, it came from China now, right?
We didn't develop it.
It came from China.
there is a virus yeah this is yeah if there was a virus yeah uh Expose News has the article about a new documentary called Inside MRNA Vaccines, the Movie.
They say it's an unfiltered second opinion on the science behind mRNA technology to provide the public with information that corporate media will not cover about the development and global rollout of the mRNA vaccine technology.
Well, I hope that they get into the long history of this, but I have concerns about it since they have Robert Malone, who is another limited hangout guy.
But, you know, this thing had been developed for quite some time, the vaccine itself, as well as all the lockdown and the tactics that they were going to use against us.
They had wargamed that from Dark Winter on, but the vaccine had been developed with BARDA and DARPA for quite some time before they rolled that out as well.
This premiered on the 12th of August, this documentary.
Features exclusive 3D animations, in-depth interviews.
I guess they show the mRNA unleashing the spike proteins like the marching brooms with their buckets of water, perhaps.
Professionals who express concern about potential gaps in data transparency, risk assessment, and long-term safety associated with the rapid adoption of this platform, the documentary argues that while regulators and much of the scientific community maintain that COVID mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, the technology is rapidly expanding beyond pandemic response, including potential applications in the food supply.
Of course, Brooke Rollins, the person that Trump just put in in USDA, the first thing she did was to approve mRNA injections into chickens and pigs and beef into our food supply to supposedly protect them from bird flu.
mRNA, I think it is going to be the legacy of Trump.
I think people are going to, I think history is going to be on my side when it comes to Trump because they're going to see that this guy was both the father and the funder of mRNA vaccines.
He has said over and over again how he's the one who created it.
He's the proud, I guess we should call him.
He's unable to stop himself from bragging about it.
Yeah, instead of being the founding father, he is the funding father of this abomination that we call the COVID vaccine, but mRNA in general.
Making sense.
Common again.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
And joining us now is James Bradley, who is the author of Flags of Our Fathers, a great book and a great film that was done by Clint Eastwood.
And he's now got another book, not about, that was about Iwo Jima, of course, and World War II.
This one is a non-fiction book, and it is about Vietnam.
It's called Precious Freedom.
And some of the reviews that are here, one person, Norman Solomon, said, for more than 60 years, Americans have looked at Vietnam through the wrong end of a telescope.
I think that's a great way of putting it.
He said, Precious Freedom turns it around and brings people into sharp focus from Vietnamese people who lived there and died to the Pentagon's gun sites.
And so I think it's a very important story.
And he spent a lot of time working on this story.
And this is a story that, for most of us, Vietnam is a very, very important milestone in our life.
I think it shaped, as it has me, shaped my view of government and war in many different ways.
And I didn't even go.
I mean, I can only imagine the people that were there.
But I did know people that went that were slightly older than I was.
I had two older sisters, and they knew a lot of people who had been involved in going to Vietnam and that experience that happened.
And so this is a story that is told with characters from both sides, Americans as well as Vietnamese.
Thank you for joining us, James.
Good to be here.
Thank you.
Now, you spent a decade in Vietnam researching this.
Tell us a little bit about that and what Vietnam is like and what that experience was like.
Well, I went, you know, I had written four books up to that point.
So I thought, you know, I wrote all about the Pacific War.
So I think my brother enlisted in the Marines in 1967.
So I was watching Walter Cronkite every night studying the Vietnam War.
And I thought, you know, I'll write a book about Vietnam.
I'll just spend three years here.
But it took me over 10 years because I had to unravel all the propaganda baloney told to us by Walter Cronkite into Ken Burns.
Right now, it's just, you know, last night you talked about a little thing that a few folks have fooled America about COVID, about the vaccine.
You know, I mean, Trump was a Russian spy, and America, the American government did it the same with us, with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Vietnam War.
Yes, absolutely right.
You know, it is, and when we look at Vietnam, I keep going back.
I haven't read your book yet, but when you go back and you look at the fog of war that was done by Errol Morris, I don't know if you ever saw that or not.
I saw it five times.
Yeah, that's a good documentary.
And he just has this knack of getting people to confess to things that normally you would not expect they confess to.
So he spent a lot of time talking to Robert McNamara, who was running this whole mess.
And McNamara said he went back to Vietnam and they banged the guy who was his counterpart at the time stood up and said, what is the matter with you?
Don't you know anything about history?
For a thousand years, we opposed the Chinese.
And you're trying to tell everybody that we're Chinese puppets and it's a domino theory and all the rest of the stuff.
And McNamara said, yeah, you know, he was right.
What is Vietnam like today?
I mean, I've seen still some border conflicts between them and China.
And there's a lot of competition there, but they've become highly industrialized, isn't that right?
Yeah, China is the forever enemy of Vietnam, you know.
That's right.
After more than a thousand years of fighting each other.
And that's how the Vietnamese learned these techniques to repel the invader.
You know, Vietnam right now, if you include reserves, has the largest army in the world.
This shocks people.
It's bigger than India, China, America, Russia.
They are watching their borders.
They're not invading anybody.
And, you know, they're protecting their borders.
Vietnam's for the Vietnamese.
And they are growing by 8% a year.
Vietnam is so successful right now.
And it would have been successful a long time ago if the French and the Americans hadn't decided to bomb it for 80 years.
Yeah, yeah.
It's amazing to think that they could get it that wrong.
They portray Vietnam as a China puppet when actually they were always opposed to them and opposition there.
Now, you did this as a fiction book.
You have done nonfiction before when you talked about Iwo Jima and the Marines that were there and Flags of Our Father.
Why did you go to a non-fiction approach?
You know, it is.
Sorry.
The book is really history as fiction.
Everything in the book is true, but whereas Iwo Jima, you know, all the characters were concentrated on a little tiny spit of land, I had stories from all over Vietnam that I couldn't connect in a storyline.
So I just did it.
I fictionalized it, but you know, so maybe I took a character that I have fighting somewhere where they didn't, but everything is from interviews.
I did over 10 years of living in Vietnam, interviewing the people.
And David, you'll be shocked.
I'm the first American author to go to Vietnam and say, how did you win?
I caddied for Vince Lombardi when I was a kid.
I'm a little older than you.
Bart Starr lived four doors down up at Bass Lake from the Bradleys.
And for anybody who doesn't know who Vince Lombardi is, when you win the NFL Trophy, I mean the Super Bowl trophy this year, you will win the Vince Lombardi trophy.
So Vince studied when he lost a game.
If he won or lost, he, you know, we admitted it and we studied how we lost and we figured out how the winners won.
And I'm the first author to go to Vietnam and say, you guys obviously won.
How did you do it?
And the answers are this book, Precious Freedom.
Yes, yes.
There's actually a comment that you have from Oliver Stone who said, James Bradley journeyed to Iwo Jima and returned with flags of our fathers, now ventures to Vietnam and brings the precious freedom, brings us precious freedom, where he reveals that if we had known what happened in the 1960s in Vietnam, American mothers would have never sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The truth is the best vaccination against great lies.
I think that's very important.
And so by going with the fictional thing, you can cover a lot of different facets that are still very realistic at the same time.
And so tell us a little bit about some of the characters out there.
You got both American and Vietnamese characters in your book, right?
Yes, it's basically Chip and May.
Chip is a U.S. Marine.
And, you know, Pete Hagseth got it wrong.
They were in pretty good shape in the Vietnam era, you know, our Marines.
It wasn't the fatness.
It was the fatheads in the Pentagon.
That's a good way to put it.
Yeah.
Chip goes into May's front yard.
May is 15 years old.
Look at this little chick.
She's 15 years old, never thought about war.
Chip shoots her father in the head.
May sees this, and at 15, she says, I'm going to kill every American I ever see.
And conveniently, the Americans came in in helmets and uniforms.
And, you know, you can tell what an American was.
So this May went out and snipered to death five Marines.
Those are the kills she got medals for.
And what is untold about the Vietnam War is the role of women.
Here's a photo.
This girl with the machine gun, can you see it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She killed 174 Americans.
Wow.
Look at, she's 22 years old.
Wow.
The number one Marine sniper killed 94.
We write books about them.
You know, we herald them.
But this is unknown that girls were out there killing Americans.
And it was because of that thousand years of fighting the Chinese.
And they went out and they had a plan.
We, we, you know, in America, the story is, how did this happen?
You can watch 18 hours of Ken Burns and it's like, wow, this is still confusing.
But if you go to Vietnam, well, actually, you can't get them to talk to you, but I did.
It took me six months of drinking tea.
And if they part the veil and tell you, they had a plan.
They were teenagers, but they knew how to seize the initiative.
This was not happenstance or accidental that Vietnam beat America.
They had a plan, they knew they were going to do it, and they executed the plan.
Well, it's also the fact that they're actually defending their home.
That's an important thing.
That's a big advantage for defenders when they're actually fighting for their lives and fighting for their home, as opposed to people who are going because they've been told that there's some kind of geopolitical thing maybe that maybe exists or maybe doesn't exist.
I think that is a key thing.
I think that's a real big part of why we do so poorly in all these asymmetric wars everywhere.
Yes, no, that's if Ho Chi Minh, I'm from Wisconsin, if Ho Chi Minh had invaded Wisconsin, that war would still be going on.
We would never give up.
That's right.
I mean, you know, me at 15 years old, I knew every alleyway.
I could run at night for five blocks, jump over fences.
I knew what doors were open, you know.
So they were defending their homeland.
That's the key.
And I've been to Afghanistan.
You know, I lived in Iran.
This bombing of Iran that we recently did in June, that united the Iranian people like never before.
Oh, yeah.
And we already...
We're going to support you later if you...
A Vietnamese guy told me, he said, you know, we were trying to recruit people in this valley, this isolated valley.
And they said, what's an American?
What's the war?
What are you talking about?
And then an American jet came and dropped bombs, and he said, we didn't have to recruit anymore.
You Americans got everybody in line with just a few bombs.
You know, we've seen that in movie after movie as well, haven't we?
You know, movies about, you know, the American Revolution or whatever, where somebody's like, I don't want to get involved in the Civil War or whatever.
I don't want to get involved until the war comes to them and they get attacked by one side unnecessarily.
Now they get galvanized and they're in it.
I think that's the key thing.
You know, we lose our wars before they even begin because we don't talk about why we should be there.
And if we go to war for an unjust cause, we are going to lose that war eventually because the people who have a just cause in terms of defending themselves are going to have the determination to finish it and whatever it takes.
That is the most important thing, I think, is that determination.
We talk about the morality of whether we have a just war or not.
Have we been attacked and how are we going to fight this?
But when we ignore that and we start acting as the world's policemen, then what we've done is we've sown the seeds of a shaky foundation that isn't going to be able to sustain us.
And on the other side, they have a strong foundation to fight back, as you point out.
If they had invaded us, we would still be fighting them.
I think that's a key thing.
So David, can I interrupt here?
Sure.
I'd like to say to your viewers and listeners, if you could just back up and listen again to what David just said, that is the key to this book, Precious Freedom.
They were defending mom and dad.
And they had a plan.
And the Americans went and they were fighting communists.
How do you find a communist?
And what is a communist?
The Vietnamese I interviewed who were 15, 16, 17 years old back in the 1960s, the one guy told me, he said, I didn't know democracy or communism.
He said, they shot my mother and killed her.
He said, that's all I had to know.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's how we lose these wars.
We don't understand what we're really fighting for.
So you talk about a distorted revisionism that we've seen here in the U.S. Define that a little bit.
When you talk about the Walter Cronkite version of the war, we talk about the Ken Burns version of the war.
How has your vision of the war changed?
It took you a while to come to terms with that.
Well, here is a real mind teaser.
And I hope you don't mind if I use visuals.
It'll save you blabbering on.
But the American view of the war, if you turn on Ken Burns, Walter Cronkite, look at any documentary, starts with this.
There was a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam.
Can you see it?
Yeah.
And there was a border between two countries, and we came to rescue South Vietnam against North Vietnam.
So I go into this 85-year-old guy's house, and he said, Mr. Bradley, he said, this was all imaginary.
The New York Times drew a line across my country.
He said, I never thought I needed a visa to visit my uncle.
There was one Vietnam.
This is how they viewed it.
There was one Vietnam, and we invaded the whole thing.
So my brother was told, you know, you go train in the Marines, you go to the South Vietnam, and you fight for freedom against these terrible commies.
But the Vietnamese never saw it that way.
They saw one country.
And if you read the speeches everybody's giving, I mean, all the Vietnamese, they start with there's only one Vietnam, there will only be one Vietnam.
And they were right.
If I drew a line across Texas, David, you know, I'm Canadian, and I come down there with the Canadian Army, and I say there's a West Texas, East Texas, there's a border, you're bad on the West side, the good is on the like, what are you talking about?
We're Texan, there's one Texas, and you would, you know, down to your grandkids, you would fight to have that reality come back.
What you said earlier about seven minutes ago, the key was not our veterans.
They did a good job.
Yeah.
The key was our leaders set up a false, a false situation right from the start.
We lost that war before we started.
What is now the politicians that were there, okay?
So you got Ho Chi Minh in the North and you got the South Vietnamese government.
Was that something that Americans created?
Was that a CIA creation or was that something that the French?
Yeah.
So it was a CIA creation.
What happened?
If I could, you know, the French were there for 80 years.
Roman Catholic Church, by the way.
And, you know, for the church, the French went in the 1880s.
They couldn't control, just like us in Afghanistan.
They had the cities.
They couldn't control the country.
Ho Chi Minh goes overseas to study the Western media for 30 years and then figures out how to beat the Americans.
He comes back.
First, they pushed the French out.
Well, in 1954, when they pushed the French out, they agreed, we'll have a temporary line at the 17th parallel, temporary.
And they wrote in the Geneva language: this is not two countries.
This is not a border.
The French have been here for 80 years, and we're just going to let them withdraw to the south and then, you know, to get the French on ships to let them go.
But Alan Dulles, the CIA, Dwight Eisenhower, Cardinal Spellman, Pope Pius came in and said, Hocus Pocus, CBS New York Times, make that a border.
And Hocus Pocus, look at there's this country, South Vietnam, North Vietnam.
Well, we weren't paying attention.
What was an Indochina?
So I grew up thinking there's a North Vietnam, South Vietnam.
I saw it every day.
I mean...
Oh, me too.
Yeah.
You know, but we know people that think that there was a COVID thing that hit the United States, right?
That's right.
And that there's a vaccine that makes you, if you take poison, you get healthy.
Yeah.
So what they did with us, Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, and there's these two countries.
But the Vietnamese, the people there, tens of millions, didn't, you know, what are you talking about, two countries?
The South Vietnamese leaders had been in the French Air Force.
They were traitors to the country.
When McNamara stood with the South Vietnamese leaders, the Vietnamese look and like, wow, we beat the French and now here's the American enemy also.
So this is why it took me 10 years.
I had to unravel everything I knew about the Vietnam War.
Yeah, and of course that happened not that long, I guess, after really maybe a decade or so after what we had done in Iran.
You know, that's the other thing.
Americans look at Iran and they remember the hostage situation and the Ayatollah.
Well, they don't remember what's what happened with the Shah that we put in power and the SAVAC that the CIA trained.
And I've talked about that many times.
I was exposed to that because I had in the engineering school, there was a lot of Iranian students who came there and they were protesting and I was asking them why they were wearing masks and they started telling me about the SAVAC and it's like, what?
So our history and our perception is so distorted by media and so distorted by a selective starting point in the narrative that it is really hard to get to the truth.
That's why books like this are very important to open up people's minds to understand how they've been controlled, I think.
So you really kind of see this as a David and Goliath story, right?
Well, I don't know David and Goliath, but it's a story of the Vietnamese.
Like if you poke a Japanese, they have a certain history.
They have no ability.
They've never been invaded, you know.
They don't know, they haven't practiced those arts.
If you talk to an American, our history is not how we were invaded by Mexico and then the Germans invaded us and then we don't have those skills.
But the Vietnamese, that's their only history.
If you're Vietnamese, you grow up with that history of, you know, great-grandfather fought the Chinese here and then your great-great-grandfather fought the Mongols in that river.
I mean, I have a picture of a guy who was 16 years old, about this tall.
And he sunk five Navy ships on a river using techniques that were a thousand years old.
The Battle of the Bak Dong River from 932.
And I said, you were 16 and you recreated a battle that was a thousand years old.
And he said, yes, Vietnam has a proud military history.
So that's what they know.
So if you want to lose a war, invade Vietnam tomorrow.
Use nuclear arms.
Use whatever you want.
You're going to lose.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
And I guess we probably could say the same thing about Afghanistan as well.
They have taken down one empire after the other, taken them on and taken them down in their country.
So I guess they've got a long history of guerrilla warfare as well.
But David, why do we choose?
Yeah.
Because they wear sandals?
I mean, Pete Eggseth wants, you know, short hair and no beards.
Well, geez, you know, they call these girls.
I mean, look at this.
This is Ho Chi Minh.
Okay, that's Ho Chi Minh with General Ziap.
Ho Chi Minh is the military genius of the Vietnam War.
Beat the French and the Americans.
Look at this tiny guy's with General Ziap.
General Ziap is the winniness general of the 20th century.
David, we talk about Eisenhower MacArthur.
Ziap beat the French.
He beat the Japanese.
He beat the Americans.
He beat the Chinese.
Vietnam is the only country in the world to have defeated three members of the United Nations Security Council.
That's their history, is how to get rid of the invader.
And we wouldn't listen to that.
But can I just say something?
That there was a United States Marine Commandant, General Shoup.
General David Shoup, Medal of Honor, Taroa, Medal of Honor, one of the worst Marine battles.
This guy knew battles.
And he resigned when Johnson wanted to go in Vietnam.
And General Shoup put on a suit and tie and crisscrossed the countries in the 60s saying, there's no way we can win.
Ho Chi Minh's the George Washington.
So there was a David Knight understanding that the media was, you know, fooling the American public back in the 1960s.
And it was being broadcast by a United States Marine Commandant, not some, you know, crazy pinko, you know, demonstrating, but a commandant was saying the Vietnamese are never going to give up.
We're going to lose.
He said, the Vietnam War is not worth one of our deaths.
This was coming from a military man, and he was right.
But Washington wouldn't listen because Brown and Root, which became Halliburton, Lockheed, you know, they made out.
Vietnam was a tragedy for them.
It was a profit center.
When I was looking at it as a young teen and then on into high school, it looked to me like the military industrial complex was using it to practice and develop weapons.
I mean, I could see that even when I was in high school.
These guys are making a killing from this stuff, and they're using it as a testing ground for their military hardware that they want to sell.
Yes, sir.
And that seemed like all it was to me when I looked at that.
It's absolutely insane how we have been manipulated, controlled, and misguided by these people who are the leaders that are there.
And they still keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Now, you've got a fictional character.
I think it's the mother of the main American character, the Marine.
And she kind of goes through this transformation that I think a lot of people in America did.
I remember when it first started, my family's conservative, so they would, yeah, this is, you know, going to make the world's hate for democracy type of thing.
And then gradually it started to understand what this war was really about.
And I think you've got a character that represents that in the mother.
Is that correct?
Betty.
Betty is the mother of Chip.
And she, you know, is college educated.
She's from Minnesota and wonderful woman, gives her son to the United States Marine Corps.
And then a guy, a funny guy by the name of Muhammad Ali says, I'm not going to kill brown people.
You know, this is an immoral war.
And what she's shocked by is that the media doesn't report his words.
And she finds his words from a friend.
And she's like, why isn't Walter Cronkite saying why Muhammad Ali won't go?
And then a guy by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King stands up in Riverside Church and says, the United States government is the biggest purveyor of violence in the world.
We are supporting a dictatorship.
Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington.
We cannot win.
153 newspapers criticize Dr. King.
But the key is nobody read Dr. King's speech because the Washington Post, New York Times, AP, nobody would reprint it because it was the truth.
And guess what?
Dr. King got a bullet in the head one year to the day of that anti-Vietnam speech.
Wow.
They really are not too concerned about killing people, are they?
I mean, you know, it could be one-on-one or it can be tens of thousands of people.
And this wakes Betty up.
And Betty slowly begins with a friend of hers who's a librarian to see that, oh my God, she's supporting this violence unconsciously.
She doesn't know that she gave her son to this wrong cause.
And of course, her son comes back damaged like so many of all of them.
You know, my father, he's a symbol of heroism.
Donald Trump has got my dad right behind him.
If you look at a shot of Trump in the Oval Office, the Iwo Jima statue is right behind him.
My father cried in his sleep for the first four years of his marriage.
I learned that after he died.
My mom told me.
You know, this is war.
We have got to stop talking about heroism and start to own up to, if you want to go to war, let's have the Trump kids go first.
That's right.
And then, you know, the grandkids of Marco Rubio and Pete Hakeseth must have somebody.
You know, send them all first.
My dad was on Iwo Jima, and there were colonels in front of him.
There were colonels getting shot.
Come on, boys.
They were leading from the front.
In Vietnam, the colonels were in helicopters and in the back.
Boys, you go out there.
The military changed after World War II, and we still have not righted it.
You know, leading from the rear, except that, you know, Trump put out that picture of him as the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse.
It's like, if that isn't disturbing, I don't know what is if he sees himself that way, a guy who has never been to war and he's going to be the guy quarterbacking this from the back.
And when you look at just the disconnect that is there and the lack of depth as he talked to these generals that he summoned in there, well, it truly is amazing.
And it really is something I think that people need to pull back and take a look at what a just war is.
And they need to look at our history of idiotic aggression.
I mean, we're about to do this again in several different places.
I mean, they want to go into Venezuela.
They would like to get involved, I think, in Iran.
Well, you talk about a quagmire in Iran, as large as that country is, and the history that we've had with them, a lot of pent-up anger because of what the CIA has done in Iran for a very long time.
We just don't seem to learn those lessons, and it's a very important lesson to learn, isn't it?
Well, why can't we learn those lessons?
You know, you should be broadcast, you know, prime time, but you're telling the truth.
So, I mean, you know, what you say about Iran, I lived in Iran.
Iranians saved my life.
I learned that Iran is Persia.
Iran is not, you know, Iran is not in bombing Baltimore.
You know, China is not in San Francisco Bay.
I'm out here in Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
And at night, I can almost hear all the billions of dollars of equipment that America is pre-positioning here to bomb Iran.
Like, why?
Why?
Let's stop it.
Let's make Chicago great.
You know, put the money in St. Louis rather than out here in Diego Garcia.
But this is what the book is about.
That's why Oliver Stone said, if we knew what I found out in Precious Freedom, mothers would have never given their kids to go to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes.
We need to be skeptical of what the government is telling us when it gets us into these wars.
And now I'm afraid they were probably going to say, and if people had known this, we wouldn't have gotten involved in Venezuela and Iran and start a war with China and Ukraine and all these other things that we're trying to escalate.
Look at how many different theaters we're in right now, and these are big fights.
And I think it was Colonel Douglas McGregor said, we're really picking fights that we can't cash these checks, essentially, to paraphrase what he had to say.
We're still doing that everywhere.
It's incredibly bad leadership that we have, civilian as well as military.
That's the story of Precious Freedom.
Yes.
The reason I'm talking about the book, and I'm so grateful that you're getting it out there, is it's not just, it's not a book about the Vietnam War.
It's a book about America, American media, how we are being fooled, military-industrial complex, you know, and how the world sees us and how we're taking our innocent sons and daughters and whipping them into these froths of what we call patriotism and sending them over to situations that they cannot win in.
So, you know, but again, it took me 10 years to figure it out.
Vietnam, you know, I thought of Vietnam as some dark place, you know, the jungles and they're growing by 8% a year.
The Vietnamese are confident.
They will welcome you if you go there.
And I realized Vietnam War was a tragedy for them, but it was a victory.
They won.
They have the confidence of winners.
And, you know, I tip my hat to all the American Vietnam veterans.
They did what they were trained to do.
The problem was our leaders put them in a jar that was impossible to break out of a situation.
And we lied and lied and lied.
I believed all, you know, I'm 71 now.
I believed many of these lies till I was, you know, 53 and went to Vietnam.
Let me ask you about Walter Cronkite, because you mentioned him a couple of times.
And, you know, Operation Mockingbird was very prevalent then.
We know that he was very friendly to the CIA narratives and stuff like that.
But at the same time, as that was happening, I heard criticism from the right saying, you know, he's going to cause us to lose a war because he's reading the names of the men every night that are killed in this war.
What is your take on how that was that part of the propaganda, the Cronkite secret?
Walter Cronkite, you know, just like all our prostitutes right now, they successfully, you know, go down the line so that the CIA will keep them, you know, in the chair.
And they appear to be, you know, oh, this war, you know, people are dying.
Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam a number of times.
He knew William Colby of the CIA who was running the CIA operations.
William Colby later admitted that the United States secretly, the CIA, kidnapped 80,000 innocent civilians, tortured them, tortured them, killed them, 80,000.
He admitted this to Congress.
Walter Cronkite, David Halberson, all these guys knew what was happening.
It was a torture program.
We had torture centers all over South Vietnam.
They knew, you know, but they didn't admit that.
We bombed Laos.
There was an airport in Laos that was the busiest airport in the world in the middle 60s.
Where was Walter Cronkite?
Yeah.
William Westmoreland, General Westmoreland, was probably the biggest opium dealer of the 1960s, running opium through the Saigon airport out to, that was the French connection, out to the Mediterranean, washing the money in the Vatican Bank.
This was all William West.
What happened to William Westmoreland after Johnson kicked him upstairs?
He went to be chief of staff of the army and he started to work on Gladio in fighting the communists in Italy.
This was a worldwide opium network that started in the Golden Triangle.
They shipped it out of Vietnam because we controlled it militarily.
You're talking about billions of dollars of CIA money.
So Walter Cronkite didn't know this?
Our top newsman, morally safer, couldn't figure this out.
It wasn't on the script they were given.
Yeah, when you look at Afghanistan and what happened there with opium stuff, it's amazing that we keep seeing all of these different, how they've used the war on drugs to fund their military operations.
I'm thinking of Ron Contra and other things like that.
The CIA is a whole nother story.
Maybe you'll do a book on them one day as well.
So we look at this moving forward, there's a lot of different characters that you're able to, with a fiction thing, a lot of different people, stories that you're able to pull into a fictional account that'd be difficult, as you said, to do otherwise.
Tell us a little bit more about the book and your approach to that.
Well, you know, Mr. Son was a 21-year-old Viet Cong leader.
When I was 13 years old, I watched CBS News, and they said, here we are on Route 9.
Route 9 is the key artery that cuts across parallel to the DMZ, and the Marines are out on Route 9.
And I looked and I thought, well, my brothers and Marines control Route 9.
So I go out to Route 9 years later with Mr. Son, and I said, oh yeah, this is Route 9.
I remember seeing this in newsreels back when I was a kid.
He said, you didn't see us in those.
He said, you didn't see me in those newsreels.
And I said, what do you mean?
Your nickname is the Tiger of Route 9.
Why didn't I see you?
He said, because Americans shot all the newsreels during the day.
He said, we were sleeping during the day.
Ho Chi Minh said, America has eyes in the sky.
Don't fight during the day.
He said, I didn't fight in the day.
I fought at night.
It's easy to be courageous at night.
So what I didn't realize is America never dominated Vietnam for a 24-hour period.
I'll repeat that.
America was never winning, not even for 24 hours, because every day at 4 p.m., what did the Marines do?
They retreated and they dug a hole.
They went back in.
They put wire around.
They put mines and they tried to get some sleep.
And that's when the Viet Cong came out.
They had specialists trained to walk like spiders through these minefields and disconnect them all and then attack the Marines at night.
So after the sleepless Marines woke up, the survivors, they couldn't go out on Route 9.
They had to have mine sweepers.
There are all sorts of mines out there.
The Vietnamese were fighting at night.
You need night goggles, night film to see the Vietnam War from the view of the Vietnamese.
And the other thing is, you know, President Obama told a group of Vietnam veterans, you won every battle.
Well, what are you talking about?
Ho Chi Minh trained his people.
He said, don't win a battle.
He said, we're just going to ambush.
If you knock off the pinky of a Marine, they'll report that home.
There'll be doctors.
There'll be, you know, tourniquets.
He said, you know, you just, you ambush, quick in, quick out.
The three quicks and the one slow.
The three quicks, you know, get ready, attack, withdraw.
What's the one slow?
Prepare.
He said, never attack unless you have the advantage.
So if I was 15 in Wisconsin, David, I could figure that out.
I'm going to see this Canadian army moving in a bunch with helmets.
I'm not going to attack them.
They could kill me.
But I'm going to get them, you know, when they turn the corner, they're not looking, you know, slingshots, get them in the knee, run away, hide in the bush.
They were ambushing us.
We never controlled Vietnam for a 24-hour period.
Wow.
Yeah, that's very different from what I've heard.
I've always heard the line, like you point out with Obama.
He's not the first or only one who said that.
I've heard that from a lot of people.
He won every battle, but then they would turn away and leave it.
So that was their best case example of trying to explain what was happening there.
And even when they put that spin on it, it's like, we had leadership that could win every battle and lose the war.
What's the matter with this?
But that puts a whole new spin on it, the fact that they're pulling back constantly.
And of course, the Vietnamese understood that they were fighting a war of attrition.
And that's because he understood America.
And he understood that, as you point out, because they had a lot of experience with other invaders, it's that war of attrition.
And that's how we always lose these wars, these asymmetric wars.
We go in and try to occupy a country and turn it into what we want it to be.
Then it turns into a war of attrition.
And that truly is an amazing insight.
That's very different from what we heard.
That's why it's important for people to see this book, I think.
You know, and I'm a Wisconsinite talking to somebody in Texas.
If I could bring up, of course, the number one game in the history of football, the Ice Bowl, 1967, Dallas Cowboys, Lambeau Field, Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr.
If you look at the stats, the Dallas Cowboys rushed for more yards.
They had more sacks.
You could look at the stats, and that's like the Vietnam War.
It's as if the Texas news media said, hey, look, we won that game in Lambeau Field, that ice bowl for the NFL championship.
Look, we ran for more yards.
Look, we had more sacks.
Look at this stat.
Look at that stat.
But in the end, the Green Bay Packers, Bard Star, Vince Lombardi won.
And Ho Chi Minh was the Vince Lombardi.
General Ziap was the winningest general of the 20th century.
And I'm not saying this to rub it in.
I'm saying it to, if we had realized these things, and even if we would realize what happened in Vietnam, that's the source.
You know, folks, there's a David Knight gold.
And David, you and I don't know each other.
We didn't talk about this in advance.
I would, you know, recommend everybody right now, take your dollars, go to David Knight Gold, get some gold.
Why am I saying that?
In 1966, the Prime Minister of Vietnam told the New York Times, you're going to go off the gold standard.
This war is going to ruin the dollar.
He told that to the Times.
The Times readers in 1966 couldn't figure it out.
71, Nixon goes on, it's because of Vietnam.
The reason we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan is we didn't look at the lessons of Vietnam.
The economy, the debt, the riots that we have right now, the government lying.
These are all stories that came, you know, the seed of them is in the Vietnam War.
And they're in this book, Precious Freedom.
Yes.
We keep making those same types of decisions.
You know, when you talk about the general who went around telling everybody that Ho Chi Minh was like George Washington, and that really is the way that we won the Revolutionary War.
Again, defending your home.
And it wasn't like they won any battles.
I mean, they won Yorktown.
That was like basically the first battle that they won.
But they were all wars of attrition.
And it was like, you know, the British could say, yeah, we got those guns and conquered in Lexington, but they got hammered the entire time they were coming back.
And we need to think in those terms, and we need to stop thinking like the world's policemen.
And we just can't get that through to people.
Maybe, you know, your book can get that into people's minds, that perspective, and how we have just the wrong approach in terms of doing this.
But again, I think it comes back to the fact that, and things are only getting worse in this regard, that we don't have the proper kind of determination whether we're going to get involved in a war.
I mean, you look at the wars that we've had since World War II, it's predominantly been because there hasn't been a real consideration or discussion of what's happening.
We've been lied into it and pushed into it by the executive branch and a supine Pentagon that is there.
It's interesting that you mentioned Westmoreland.
I didn't know about his involvement with Gladio.
I mean, I've looked at Gladio quite a bit, but I didn't notice that he was there.
And we should think about that part of it as well.
I mean, NATO has got an unbelievable history when you go back and look at NATO, not just the things that are happening in Eastern Europe, but a long, long history of false flags and things like that.
Yeah, the book is Precious Freedom.
And I tell you, freedom is precious and so is life.
And we have allowed our government to put them on a very low priority.
They've got a different priority.
We need to start waking up as a people.
And I think the important thing is that we have to, and when you've got a fictional narrative like this, it's very powerful because you can get into people's feelings in a way that's difficult to do in a non-fiction book.
And I think that ability to tell a narrative story like that can really affect people's hearts and minds.
And that's what this is all truly about.
That was something that was a big part of the Vietnamese, the Vietnam War, was the hearts and minds that they were losing.
And we need to make sure that they don't have control of our hearts and minds again.
And I think the best anecdote is to have the truth presented to them in a very effective way.
And I think your book is one of those ways that people can get that message out to people.
Thank you, David.
I appreciate that.
And thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it.
Well, thank you for what you're doing.
I think it's very important work.
And I think it's important for people to see this.
And we all grew up in Vietnam.
And I think it's also important for people to go back and to question what they were told.
And once you do that, that's a real eye-opening experience.
And so many of us have had that experience with Vietnam.
I know a lot of people who went to Vietnam and they had that same kind of experience and were severely harmed by that.
But our country was severely harmed by the Vietnam War.
So again, the book is Precious Freedom.
And people can find it on Amazon.
Is that the best place for people to find your book?
Do you have a website that you're selling it?
Okay.
No, jump to Amazon.
You'll get it delivered November 11th.
It's being officially published, but pre-orders really help a lot.
And this is going to have a lot of readership in Asia.
Vietnam was not a small American story.
It was global.
Yes.
It should be made into a movie, like your other book was.
I think it would probably be.
Yeah, I think it would be a great movie.
It's a story that really needs to be told.
Who knows?
Maybe Clint Eastwood will do it.
He's still game for doing movies.
He's not giving up yet on that.
But maybe they'll find a good director if there's any left in Hollywood.
I don't know.
But it'd be a great movie, I'm sure.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, James Bradley.
And again, the book is Precious Freedom.
And to
the David Knight Show.
Welcome back.
Our guest is Steve Bonta.
He's publisher of the New American.
It's a magazine from the John Burst Society.
And we were just talking off air, and he's lived in Argentina.
So he can tell us a little bit about that.
He's also most recently lived in China as well.
He's the author of a book Inside the United Nations and a lot of articles from New Americans.
As a matter of fact, there was one that I wanted to get to today before he came on that I didn't have a chance to, and we'll talk about that.
And that is the UN trying to establish a tax, a global tax on shipping in the name of the climate MacGuffin.
And so we'll talk about that as well.
But he also contacted me because he wanted to talk about gold and money, and that's also very topical right now.
So thank you for joining us, Steve.
Happy to be here.
Thank you.
Let's talk a little bit since I was just talking about Argentina and beef and things like that.
Give us your take on what's having lived in Argentina.
Give us your take on what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, the thing about Argentina, I lived there as a teenager way back before the Falklands War and the military junta days.
Oh, wow.
And Argentina is not like, well, the whole southern cone, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile in particular, is really quite different from what most Americans think Latin America is like.
Most people think of Latin America, they think of, you know, men with sombreros and donkeys and, you know, tortillas and that kind of thing.
We think in terms of Mexican, maybe Caribbean American stuff, Puerto Rico.
And southern South America, Argentina in particular, is a lot more like Europe.
In fact, Argentina, culturally, is more Italian than Spanish.
There are more people of Italian ancestry than Spanish ancestry.
And the current president, Javier Millé, excuse me, is one of them.
And when I arrived in Argentina in 1979, I was really shocked at how well educated the people were.
It's a very bookish society.
People love to play chess, for example.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
They have their problems too, but they are very well educated.
And in those days, mostly maleducated and pironists and supporters of socialism and so forth.
But Millay is a different animal altogether.
He's a very, very bright guy and extremely articulate.
Anyone who knows Spanish listening to him talk, he's very persuasive.
He's really a silver-tongued individual.
And as is his mentor, an Argentine economist named Alberto Benegas Lynch.
You can find lectures by him on YouTube as well.
And these are both men of very sound understanding of free market economics and principles of libertarianism generally, the non-aggression principle, all the rest of this stuff.
And so Millé is a multi-talented individual, very much in the Argentine mold.
He's an accomplished, I believe, a rock guitarist and a semi-professional soccer player, a football player at one point, and this kind of thing.
And mostly self-educated as an economist, as well as a successful talk show host, kind of a Russian Lindbaugh type figure, and this kind of thing.
And now, obviously, he's the president of Argentina.
Argentina is, of all of the Latin American countries, probably has the government most similar to ours, at least on paper.
So the Argentine, when Argentina first became independent of Spain, it was ruled for several decades by a series of what they called caudillos, which were military dictators, culminating in a guy named General Rosas, who was a really horrific dictator, ran a true police state.
This was in the 1850s.
And when Rosas finally fell, he was replaced.
A group of men quite similar to the American founders, called themselves the Generation of 1838, came forward.
Some of them had studied in Europe and in the United States, had traveled abroad, studied the systems of government of the countries, including the U.S. Constitution, and they attempted to craft a constitution similar to ours.
Argentina is a federal republic, just like the United States is.
It consists of provinces rather than states, but it's very much a federal type arrangement.
And unfortunately, unlike the U.S., well, I mean, maybe similar to us, their constitution has been reformed with scare quotes a number of times.
And so this has enabled the rise of the left.
Obviously, Argentina, as Millay never tires of pointing out, was once one of the world's most powerful countries.
In fact, if you were a European ground down by the yoke of European feudalism, a peasant yearning to be free and have some sort of opportunity in life, there were two prime destinations in the late 19th century.
One was, of course, the U.S., and the other was Argentina.
And Argentina, like the U.S., was and remains a melting pot, very amenable to immigration, and at one time was very, very a place where a man could basically go and do as he pleased and prosper or fail according to his own efforts.
And obviously, all that's and that led to a state of affairs where by the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the top five or so richest countries in the world.
And the expression in English, as rich as an Argentine, was a common expression back in the roaring 20s and all that.
All that's changed.
You don't look at that anymore.
Yeah, so yeah, and so Argentina has since undergone almost a century of socialism.
They call it Peronism, but it's a species of collectivism.
And with just horrific results, when I was there more than 40 years ago living there, I've been back since, but when I was actually living there, the inflation rate was running at 50, 100% per month and this kind of thing.
And no one under those circumstances could save money.
The moment you got paid anything, you immediately had to buy land or buy gold, silver, any type of actual assets because the idea of actually putting in a savings account or anything like that was not to be thought of.
So this is the way the Argentine economy has evolved.
And then Malay comes along and says, have you had enough?
And the younger generation in Argentina, kind of similar to the way our Gen Z is shaping up here, has said, you know, we don't want this anymore.
You know, this may have worked for our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents, but this isn't what we want.
We want opportunity.
We want to be able to, you know, to actually enjoy the fruits of our labors.
And so I think Malay is right-headed, but now he's encountering, he's in a situation where he's no longer living in the world of theory.
He's living in the pragmatic, rough and tumble world of politics, where the reality is, and this may or may not be reinforced by this weekend's elections, national congressional elections, is that he's kind of a lone man.
The Peronas still dominate the Congress, and they use it to thwart most of his agenda.
So it's been very, very rough slog for him.
And whether he'll succeed is still an open question.
I mean, when I see these, right now he's been barnstorming all around the country to rapturous crowds in many towns and cities that have never had an Argentine president visit them before because he wants to make gains in Congress in this weekend's congressional elections.
But I see these videos and I think, yeah, one person could step out of the crowd with a pistol and this would all be done with.
Well, it's a very cautionary tale for us because if they started with a constitution and aspirations of freedom, looking at America, and then you look at what happened with the Peronistas and all the rest of the stuff, a large part of that, I think, is the cult of personality.
And I think that's one of the things that, you know, I don't know.
I've never lived there, so I don't know the pulse of the people.
But when I look at how infatuated they were with Juan and Evita Peron and how that played out through them, this whole idea of people getting attached to an individual or to a party rather than to a set of principles.
And I look at that and say, well, you can't really reverse course.
And in a sense, Javier Malay comes in with a very charismatic personality as well.
It's a different type of personality, as you pointed out, his rock star aspects and his sharp tongue that he's got, throwing out not only debating points, but also insults to people and the hair that he is his trademark and all the rest of the stuff.
So in a sense, you still have the Argentine people, I think, influenced a great deal, as everybody is, as we are here in America, by personalities that are there.
And if they can have a situation where their free society can be overthrown and you wind up with a paranistas and you wind up with people being disappeared, put into helicopters and flown out and dropped into the ocean, if you're a political dissident, that can happen anywhere.
It can happen here as well, can it?
Yeah, and I mean, it has happened here in the sense.
I mean, Perone was the same generation as FDR.
And FDR's, the stamp of his personality still remains in Washington, D.C.
I mean, FDR was the, you know, the pivotal 20th century figure in American politics in which he basically came out, he seized the tiller of the ship of state and said, hard left.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what we're going to do.
And from now on, everything is going to emanate from the federal government, the federal government.
There is no problem that cannot be solved by the creative application of federal government force.
That was the premise of the New Deal.
And these other lesser figures, Lyndon Johnson and more recently, Clinton and Obama and even Joe Biden and so forth, are just really pale shadows, but they're swimming in his wake.
And the state of affairs where Washington, D.C. is wholly owned by the Democratic Party, which embodies that philosophy, I think, more completely than the Republicans, although they're certainly not perfect either.
This is really a partisan issue as such.
But all of that, which Trump is now purporting to fight against and overturn and so forth, is the legacy of the cult of personality of FDR and the man who followed him, Truman as well to some extent, had that effect.
But they permanently altered, well, up till now, permanently altered the direction of the ship of state.
And it's proving a very rough slog indeed to change people's minds and say, well, we need to get back to the idea that the federal government is the creation and not the creator, that it is to be subordinate to the states, and they in turn to the people and the Constitution and all this type of thing.
It's a very tough sell now.
So, you know, I had a very interesting interview.
That's the same thing.
Yes.
I had a very interesting interview last week with a guy who just wrote a new biography of FDR.
And very, very interesting.
His point of view was that even though you had the Democrats who wanted to go to the same place that FDR did, you still had a lot of opposition within the Democrat Party to a lot of these extreme, radical, authoritarian tactics that FDR was doing.
They said, we don't want to do it that way.
There was a clear understanding in early 20th century America, just like we saw with alcohol prohibition.
They wanted alcohol prohibition, but they didn't do something like our drug war.
They said, we've got to have a constitutional amendment.
And so you had people, even though they wanted to go the same place that FDR did in terms of government control and government taking over and running everything, they said, we're worried about that tactic, whether it's packing the Supreme Court or various other things that he was doing.
And that's what I think is sadly lacking on both the left and the right in America today.
And I go back and I look at FDR.
I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Strauss and Howe fourth turning the book that's there.
But I see that to me, I see that we're in another fourth turning right now, as they predicted.
And, you know, we have these fourth-turning presidents like Lincoln and FDR.
Now I think Trump is in that mole who want to go very quickly, accelerationists.
They want to create chaos, and they don't care what means are used as long as they get their desired end.
And I think we're seeing the problem right now, and I think we're going to see this, is that even if we agree on the goal of where they want to go, and I do agree with Trump on many of the goals of where he wants to go, very concerned about the means that he's using because it's going to set very, very dangerous precedents that will come back to haunt us, I think.
Well, and this is, you know, the problem with permitting the radical, I hate to use the word radical left, but these radical utopian reformists, they're all collectivists by disposition, allowing them enough leeway until you get to the point that Argentina was in by the 1970s, where they control the judiciary.
They control all the local governments.
They control the police force, everything else.
And the same was true by the time that Allende came to power in Chile in the 1970s, or when Fujimori came to power in Peru in the 1990s.
In all of those cases, the radical left had progressed to the point where they were militarized, where they're kind of going where Antifa would like to go, but we aren't quite that there yet.
The question becomes: how do you solve that problem when you're so far gone that there's no longer any appeal to the law because the judiciary is all corrupted and the police can't be relied upon and all this type of thing.
And so this creates a well-nigh insoluble problem.
We say, well, the only thing to do is to do what Pinochet did in Chile and Fujimori did in Peru and the military junta, Galtieri and people like that did in Argentina.
And that is you go in and you use extraordinary force and you try to clean house.
And I'm very much afraid that we're approaching that point in the United States because we've already gotten to the point where the law is so twisted that they don't do much if you go out and wearing the banner of Antifa or Black Lives Matter or something like that and vandalize stores, assault, even kill people and this sort of thing, the law gives you a slap on the wrist.
But heaven forfend if you defend yourself against someone like that, as happened in Kenosha right here in Wisconsin a few years ago, and this type of thing, where you get the point where the law and the judiciary can no longer be relied upon.
It gets to the point, and this is what revolutionaries, of course, know.
They understand that if they can destabilize things to a certain point, the only possible remedy is some sort of a crackdown from above.
And then that generates the pretext to say, you see, you see, they are fascist, just like we're saying, you know, and that gives them more impetus.
And that's kind of what's happening now, where the Trump administration has the situation where the cores of a number of our major cities are completely out of control.
And the local magistrates don't want to do anything about it because they're in sympathy within because they perceive that crime creates a rationale for more government.
I mean, at some level, venal politicians like crime and like civil unrest because it creates a need for them and their services.
And so that's the reason that places like Chicago and Memphis and Portland and LA and New York, of course, their local constabularies are saying, oh, we're not going to crack down and so forth.
And so what are you going to do?
It's a very difficult problem.
And I think that push is coming from the right also.
So I've said for the longest time in terms of this fourth turning, you go back and you're like, previous three fourth turnings we've had in the U.S. have been, you know, the Depression, World War II, prior to that, the Civil War, part of the world.
The whole Revolution War.
And I said, yeah.
And so I said, you know, I think we're probably going to have all three of these things at once.
I think we're going to have a depression.
I think we're going to also have a civil war, a revolutionary war, and a world war.
And it seems like all of our global leaders, regardless of what political party they're in, regardless of whether they're left or right, they all seem to be pushing us in this direction.
I wish I could say, no, you're wrong, and here's why.
But I mean, obviously, anything can happen.
No one can see the future.
But I tend to, I would not be at all surprised if that scenario unfolds over the next five to ten years.
Oh, yeah.
Well, let's bring it back to the farmers.
I mean, what do you think?
Have you paid attention to what's going on?
I mean, a lot of what they're saying is, and we have seen this when we saw things with the eggs, for example.
They go through with a PCR procedure and say, well, we've got one chicken here that tested positive, so we're going to kill all five million of them here at this location, that type of thing.
It was kind of a government-imposed thing, began under Biden, but it continued under Trump's USDA until Brooke Rollins said, now our solution is that you vaccinate all the chickens with mRNA and other animals with this mRNA vaccine.
So the question is, you know, we have so many different issues.
You know, one of the issues with beef stuff is the consolidation of it.
Part of that is the government-mandated centralized processing, meat processing places that are there.
You know, what do we do from a market perspective?
I mean, certainly Trump and Besant are not even focused on what's going on with the farms.
And it's a surprise because we saw what happened in the first Trump administration when he started messing with China and trade and tariffs and things like that.
They immediately retaliated against agriculture.
And the government was slow to act at that point in time to repair the damage that they had inflicted.
And they're being very, very slow to do it now.
What do you think is going on with that?
Well, in generalities, first of all, I mean, the problem is we tend to elect urban people as presidents.
Obviously, Trump being no exception.
He's an East Coast urbanite.
He's now a Florida urbanite, whereas formerly he was a New York urbanite.
But those people, and I can say this without prejudice because I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania on a farm.
And I've lived in Nebraska as well, worked in a small cattle bank in a Nebraska cattle town for some of you.
Well, you had quite a background.
I've been around the world.
But I can tell you this: I mean, the contrast in culture between, I live in Wisconsin now, by the way, which is a farming state, primarily dairy farms.
But the contrast in the mentality of the man of the earth, the farmer, and the urbanite is very stark.
And urbanites tend to view the economy primarily in financial terms.
The key secret to economic success is making sure, keeping an eye on the money supply and proper monetary policy and all that type of thing, because of course, all the big cities are where the banking and the finance takes place.
That's their primary raison d'être is to be enablers of international trade and finance and banking and all that sort of thing.
I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is where all the action is as far as monetary policy is concerned.
So that's the lens through which someone like Trump is going to tend to see the world and not really have a grasp of farming.
I mean, I happen to think that Casey, Ezra Taph Benson, some other good secretaries of agriculture, that we shouldn't even have a Department of Agriculture.
Oh, I agree.
I don't see that as being part of the constitutional purview of the federal government.
And that's kind of an extra constitutional heresy that goes back also more than 100 years, well before FDR.
The Department of Agriculture was already had its finger in the pie and was influencing with the market mechanisms as far as the prices of crops were concerned and this kind of thing.
So I tend to be a Jeffersonian in the sense that I think that an ideal republic is first and foremost agrarian.
I think manufacturing and finance and all those things are fine, but it's all predicated on a strong agrarian.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
He believed that an agrarian society was essential to maintaining our level and our form of government.
And I agree with him.
When you look at our Civil War, for example, I've mentioned many, many times that Italy had a civil war at exactly the same time.
And they didn't have slaves, but it was about the consolidation and centralization of power, creating a nation-state, when in the past they had had a relatively decentralized, agrarian Italy.
They wanted to create a nation-state, and it was driven by a lot of manufacturing and urban interests that were involved in that.
And so that's what we see happening over and over again.
Jefferson said, as you're talking about, how it's always focused on finances and other things, like they said, cities are a threat to the health, the wealth, and the liberty of man.
I think nothing has changed with that.
It's just in the nature of the way that people live.
Well, here's the thing about agrarianism: number one, it delivers the best possible standard of living.
I mean, Rome never had it better than when they were an agrarian republic, for example.
And the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of the medieval Italian republics and so forth and so on.
Although many of them were also based on trade and all this kind of thing.
But the thing is that agrarianism is not conducive to domination.
That's right.
You're self-sufficient, yes, exactly.
But finance is.
I mean, the basis, yeah, the basis for imperialism or whatever you want to call it, that kind of thing, being a superpower, is finance.
You have to have robust finances and robust banking systems and all this.
That's very much, of course, in sync with the Hamiltonian vision of America.
But America did just fine for all of the decades that it wasn't a superpower, a world-engirding power.
And the idea, and this is as much implicit in the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration as it was in all of his predecessors going back to the early 20th century.
The idea is that America is a superpower and must remain a superpower.
Yes, yes.
Phrases like, you know, we're the indispensable nation, all this kind of thing, well, kind of feed into that.
And here's an interesting thing: you know, speaking of Argentina as well, I mean, Argentina, interestingly enough, has never been a great military power.
They've never, actually moved to the South, they've never been.
But they showed that during the Falkland Wars, didn't they?
Yeah, the Falkland Wars was an exception.
There's some interesting history there, too.
The wind of that right now.
But by and large, Argentina has been very content with its dominion there in southern South America.
It has all that it needs and feels no need, though it certainly has the resources.
I mean, resource-wise, it's just as blessed as the United States.
They could become a superpower if they wanted to.
They just don't want that.
And so the United States, I mean, it's heresy to say this, but I wrote an article a while ago for the magazine questioning the very premise: should America be a superpower?
Is this really what the founders envisioned?
Is that we want?
And obviously, it depends what you mean by superpower you mean, well, you know, the greatest country on earth, the place that everybody wants to go to live and all that.
Okay, well, I suppose.
But if you mean it in the sense that we mean it today, you know, the dominatrix of the world, so to speak, that is something very much counter to what the founders wanted.
And so going back to our agrarian roots, you know, like, wow, what's his name?
The financial wizard who now lives in Singapore.
I can't think of his name.
But he's said a lot in recent years.
He thinks that the future of wealth is actually going to be in farming after this whole fourth-turning thing gets through the data.
Bill Gates kind of thinks that, doesn't he?
He's bought a lot of land, even though he doesn't want to have agricultural farming.
He wants to manufacture food.
He still has bought a lot of land.
And I think he realizes that's the fallback position.
Maybe after they destroy the food supply and everybody is fed up, just like they are with Beyond Meat.
I was just talking about how their stock that hit a high of $240 is now less than a dollar.
So after all of that, people turn back to the farm.
And so he's kind of hedging his bets by getting farmland.
Yeah, yeah, and why not?
I mean, because that's they call it real estate for a reason.
There's a certain tangible reality about owning land and developing it for farming or whatever.
And I think we've sort of become divorced from that in our relentless quest for ascendancy over nature, which is understandable.
It's good that we have things like the polio vaccine and all the rest of that nowadays.
We have modern medicine and maybe that life is not quite so Hobbesian as it once was.
So it's understandable that we want to subdue nature, the more brutish aspects of nature.
But at the same time, you don't want to throw the baby out with a bath and say, we're going to live entirely in this technocratic society, completely divorced from the need to get our hands dirty, Mike Rose style, anything like that.
Yeah, a virtual reality, which is not a reality at all.
Well, you were talking about this idea of American exceptionalism and how we are indispensable and how we have to be, you know, it has to be Pax Americana and so forth, and how financial issues are so much a part of that.
And so, of course, when we look at the Federal Reserve and what is happening with gold, give us your take on that.
That is, of course, the superpower that underlies the American empire, and that is the ability to conjure money up out of nowhere.
And they may be at the end of their road and force everywhere else to use it because it's the world reserve currency.
That's the real rub.
And that's the reason.
I mean, I was talking with an economist the other day on this.
Why is it that Argentina, when they print a lot of money, all they get is horrendous inflation?
Whereas we do the same thing, and somehow it never has that same effect.
Well, the answer is that we enjoy a luxury that the Argentine Central Bank does not.
Namely, we can export.
We can print lots of money.
We can create lots of debt, ex nihilo, and people will come and buy it because pursuant the remnants of the Bretton Woods Agreement and just the way the world works now, everything is denominated in dollars.
There's a unique demand for U.S. dollars that doesn't exist for Argentine pesos or even Euros or Japanese yen or something like that.
So we've managed to insulate ourselves to some extent, and a lot of the inflation has been shipped abroad.
But what's happening now, I mean, inflation is a very complex than simply, okay, we double the money supply and prices double, that kind of thing.
It's not as simple as that.
It's more diffuse.
And this is the reason that a lot of economists, not just modern monetary theorists, but a lot of economists, Keynesians all, reject the idea that inflation is ultimately a monetary phenomenon that's caused, in effect, by governments and banks printing money because it's hard to see, in terms of the prices, price rises versus the money supply.
It's very complex.
It's hard to perceive.
Some prices rise faster than others and so forth and so on.
But the reality is that inflation is caused by printing money.
Inflation is not possible except under the circumstances, under conditions of a fiat money source.
And fiat means money that's not tied to gold and silver.
Funny thing is that gold and silver, for all of the obloquy that's been thrown at them, gold was famously called a barbarous relic by Keynes.
And this kind of thing, people who believe in the advisability of returning to the gold standard are derisively called gold bugs in economic parlance and so forth.
In spite of all that, the fact is that gold and silver remain real money.
And their price behaves like real money.
So if you want to sort of cut through all of the complications of inflation, you know, consumer price inflation versus asset inflation, all this type of thing, you know, and see, well, what's really happening?
You look at the price of gold and silver and it's going through the roof.
But here's the interesting thing.
I saw an article.
And I think it's because the central banks don't buy into this Keynesianism.
And certainly they don't buy into the modern monetary theory, which I call the magic money tree of the MMT.
They're accumulating gold for their own purposes.
And even if they're trying to come up with an alternative economic system, financial system to ours, which has been weaponized, they are still turning to gold for credibility.
Well, sure.
Although they say, well, it's just a hedge and all this type of thing.
But the reality is, and I saw, I mean, so if you, I was just attending a conference the other day down in Florida at the Demis Institute, and there was a lot of talk about this.
And one of the cardinal features of a free market, a non-inflationary free market economy, is that over time, prices will tend to fall.
And we saw this, for example, in the United States post-Civil War, the latter half of the 19th century, is that prices of goods and services gradually decrease over time.
And to some extent, we even see it today, although it's very much muddied by the inflationary waters.
But you see, for example, things like the prices of cell phones and laptops and so forth tend to decline over time.
But here's something that never declines in price, supposedly, and that's houses.
People love to flip houses, buy houses, investments, real estate, because people, the mantra goes, the value is always going to go up, even if you don't do anything to improve.
The value is going to go up over time.
This has been our experience.
Well, there's a reason for that.
And the reason is that those are assets that are very close to where the money spigots are, and the money center banks, where the new money enters the economy.
And so, like stock prices, the prices of real estate, houses, and so forth, are driven up artificially by inflationary government policy.
But here's an interesting fact.
Apparently, the price of houses, if reckoned in terms of gold, has also been slowly declining over the years and decades.
In other words, if you reckon things in terms of gold and/or silver, then you see the true, you know, the real economy.
Yes.
And what we're seeing now with gold, you know, the skyrocketing gold and now silver prices as well.
I'm kind of glad I bought silver over the last several years.
Although, that's a silly thing to say, though, isn't it?
Because my silver is quote-unquote worth more, but it really isn't.
Yeah, it's the dollar's worthless.
And it would be the height of folly for me to take the silver and say, ooh, now it's worth twice what it was.
I'm going to sell it and make a profit on it.
I'm not making a profit.
Because what's happened is the worth of the dollar relative to real money, to silver and gold, has plummeted.
And those are both indices of very severe inflation, even if we're not yet seeing it at the grocery stores.
I agree.
As a matter of fact, there were some articles saying, you know, you need to start looking at assets and even things like the stock markets.
Look at them in terms of gold and they don't look so good.
We've had a lot of inflation in terms of stock prices, a lot of it because of the AI bubble.
But when you look at it in terms of the Dow Jones Industrial Average or these other market-wide metrics, it hasn't gone up as much as gold has.
And I know I've talked to Tony Arteman in the past.
We've looked at people done experiments and gone back and say, how much would it cost to do certain things over 100 years, say 120 years ago or so, before they went onto the fiat thing?
If you had gold, if you bought a custom soup or you took a trip where you did this or that and start to compare it, and they would find that it was pretty much comparable, just like you were saying with real estate, that it was basically the prices were about the same if you priced it in terms of gold, although the prices have gone up significantly in terms of fiat currency.
Well, and the fact that people have this mistaken idea, they think in terms of what things are worth in the dollar, is a reflection of the intuition that people have that goes back to the days when we had sound money, you know, pre, you know, the bank act and pre-FDR and all that kind of thing.
And that is the idea that money should be both something with value and also an accountancy, something, a way of keeping records.
Whereas in a fiat money system, money no longer has value.
It's just an accountancy device.
The value is still there, but it's been divorced from money.
That's reflected in the behavior of gold and silver in that sense.
But money itself is no longer a repository for value.
And I know that some of the Misans will criticize the very idea of value, this kind of thing, because valuation is very subjective.
But that's the issue.
But people still think money should be valuable in some sense, in the sense that it once was.
And so that's where this confusion arises from.
People say, well, how much is this worth in $1965 or $1980 and this kind of thing?
But what we have now is under so-called fiat money, which is really a contradiction in terms, is purely and simply a system of accountancy that is fraudulent.
Yeah, that's right.
Because it says, you put $1,000 of me in the bank, and it's still going to be worth $1,000 plus whatever interest 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
Of course, that's not the case.
Everybody knows this.
Yes, that's right.
And so when you look at the retail trade, a lot of urban mining going on.
New York Times actually wrote an article about it this last week about the rush of people to go down to the diamond district in New York City where people pay you for your jewelry.
So people are taking gold and silver jewelry down, cashing it out.
One woman was saying, well, you know, I got $7,000 for this, and now I'm going to go take a vacation or whatever.
So she's not using it as a store of value.
She's just cashing it in and taking a vacation at, you know, taking advantage of the fact that she can get the vacation that's still priced in dollars.
She can get that in the value of gold.
But what they're doing is they're transferring out of an asset that retains its value into something that is evaporating very quickly.
Makes sense if you're going to immediately consume it, but uh, and and a lot of people are caught in a liquidity trap.
As a matter of fact, when we saw the plunge in gold and silver, the questions were: was this the last day or so?
Questions are, is this profit-taking?
Because it's been going straight up for quite some time.
Or, as one person who is a former Federal Reserve governor said, I think this is indicating something's bigger than that, than just price than taking profits.
They said, This looks to me like a liquidity issue, like the type of thing that we saw back in the spring of 2020 when we had the lockdowns imposed on us and that type of thing.
And said, I think a lot of people in the financial markets are getting caught in a liquidity squeeze, and they're having to liquidate gold with that.
So, we'll see what happens with that.
But that's the key issue, and it's really a control issue.
I think it's kind of interesting.
You know, we talk about Bretton Woods, as you mentioned before.
When you look at what happened with Bretton Woods 2, Kissinger moved it to essentially the petrodollar.
He kind of tied the dollar to energy using Saudi Arabia, and that has now disappeared.
Perhaps that's what's going on with Venezuela.
What do you think about that?
They got more oil than Saudi.
We could reinstitute a petrodollar if we control that oil.
Yeah, that's part of it, to be sure.
And his neighbor, Guiana, it turns out, has a lot of oil too.
So, you know, that whole part of the world, as does Mexico.
And so, yeah, I mean, and Argentina does too.
I don't know if people don't know this, but particularly down in Patagonia, in Chubut province, in particular, and Ushuaya, way down the southern tip of Argentina, is now become quite the oil boom town.
Wow.
So, Patagonia is not just high-expensive clothing, right?
No, no, I've been down there.
It's a name of the country.
Beautiful area, but it's definitely prospering quite remarkably.
And a lot of that is because of the oil that's found on the continental shelf off the coast of Argentina there.
And so, yeah, there's a lot of, and you can bet that that's in the back of Trump's mind and Besson's mind as well when they're kind of building this new bromance with Malays Argentina.
So, yeah, I mean, no doubt.
Oil is still, in spite of all of the quest for alternative energy and the kind of fanatical attempts to rid the world of fossil fuels, the pragmatic reality is that oil ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
That's right.
So, it's going to remain the main stock in trade.
The engine of growth, yeah.
I mean, China right now is trying to sort of belatedly realize that their policy of having a financial bamboo curtain around China and preventing the Renminbi from being used internationally for fear that it might be destabilized or something like this.
They're finally realizing if we really want to compete with the United States, we have to try to internationalize, to globalize the Renminbi and make it an alternative to the U.S. dollar.
But they have one major disadvantage, and that is that China has no oil.
They don't, none that anyone's aware of.
They're completely an oil and gas-importing country from Russia and other places.
And so they're not a power player.
Yeah, and you go back and look at it.
I mean, oil is foundational to so many of our wars and as well as to the economy.
And if you go back to the 1930s and the technocracs and the technocracy incorporated and so forth, they were talking about essentially getting rid of money and evaluating everything in terms of energy usage.
And of course, you've got a lot of people who buy into that technocracy philosophy, people like Thiel and Musk who are around Trump.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, I think this whole idea that for them, it makes sense to evaluate things in terms of energy.
And of course, the energy would be the barrel of oil still as a practical matter.
So I think that's the foundation of a lot of this stuff that we're seeing here.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Enough to say that.
So while we talk about that, I mean, the UN, though, sees that their power basis is kind of using what I call a MacGuffin because that goes back to what Hitchcock said.
You know, it's basically just something that you put out there to control the narrative.
And so their basis is to try to also control energy by restricting it, by taxing it, and so forth.
And you had an interesting article on the New American about the UN tax.
And we see something being done right by Trump here.
I have been very critical of most of Trump's policies, but I think one place where he has done a far better job than any of the other presidents has been on the energy issue in both the first term and now I think in the second term, it's still not perfect.
There's many things that are still left out of it.
But they put their foot down against this UN global tax on shipping.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, so this is something that has been in the works for a number of years at the behest of the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, which is a little-known UN appendage.
It's part of the UN, and its job is to regulate shipping.
Okay, and there's, by the way, there's a corresponding organization to regulate aviation, and they're trying to do the same thing to instigate a global tax on aviation fuel as well.
But that's another story.
So the shipping tax is potentially a tectonic event because it would represent, I mean, irrespective of what kind of taxes, it would be the first time that the United Nations would have independent taxing authority.
And they have to have that.
And they have to have that to be a powerhouse, really.
You know, first you've got to have the ability to tax, and then you have to have the ability to raise an army.
Right, and obviously.
Yeah, and so those are two things that politically were not palatable back in the mid-1940s when the UN and also the Bretton Woods system were set up.
The people who said, I would have dearly liked to have proclaimed the UN a world government then, but knew that that was not feasible.
And so they created an organization that could be the framework, could be gradually filled out over time and turn into a world government, which is why the UN looks like a government, why it has basically a bicameral legislature, has the Security Council and the General Assembly, and it has or purports to have executive, legislative, and judicial powers and all this type of thing.
There's a reason for all of that.
But what the UN doesn't have de facto is the, number one, you mentioned a military.
I mean, to the extent that there's a UN military at all, it's crucially dependent on the willingness of member states to contribute troops to serve under UN command.
But they don't have the authority to levy their own troops, to conscript people.
They don't have their own independent military.
And the same is true of taxation.
All governments worth their salt have the authority, the power to levy taxes, which the UN doesn't.
I mean, how does it get funded?
Well, primarily by, again, by donations from member states, membership fees and the like.
And that's been a great, has curtailed the UN's ability to live up to the potential envisaged by its founders.
But now, and, you know, we were warning about this.
I and my colleague Alex Newman in particular have written a number of articles on this impending global tax in shipping, which has been in the making for five, six years.
It's kind of been out there.
And we fully expected that it was going to happen this year.
And that would represent the first time that the UN was able to collect, to have its own revenue stream.
And it won't be the last.
I mean, if it's passed, there are other ideas out there like taxing international transactions on the internet, Obviously, carbon tax of jet fuel is another major one.
Things like a global income tax, global property taxes are further down the road.
But certainly, they kind of hope for that as well.
And in this case, what happened was that the Trump administration, in a rare, I have to say, a rare spasm of ideological clarity, Trump himself said, this is an unconstitutional global tax.
It's not happening.
And if anyone tries to make this happen, we're going to impose severe penalties on them and so forth.
And the result was that some countries, including Argentina, by the way, which earlier this year abstained from voting on the measure, they kind of tried to wiggle their way through it.
They turned into a firm no vote.
And on the other hand, Brazil, China, and most of the EU, certainly the UK, are supporters of the measure.
But Saudi Arabia and the other major petroleum exporting countries, a lot of countries that are crucially dependent on cruise lines, like the Caribbean nations for their economic well-being, were all opposed to it.
And it ended up being a very slim vote no, but it's not really no.
Okay, so what they were going to basically at the IMO summit in London, they were supposed to rubber stamp this thing, and in another year or two, it's going to start coming into effect.
And the UN will start having all this money coming in, ostensibly in the name of reducing carbon emissions and moving forward the net zero 2050 goal, all that stuff.
And instead, they were on the verge of saying it's just not going to happen, but in a last-minute act of parliamentary ledger demand, a couple of the people said, oh, well, here's what we'll do.
We'll vote to table the thing for a year.
So that's what they did.
They said, okay, we're not going to make a decision on it now.
We're going to meet again a year from now.
And of course, they're hoping against hope that the politics will change by then.
And this is what they always do.
This is how the globalists operate.
If once you don't succeed, you try, try, try, try, try again until eventually you get the result that you want.
So this is not going away.
Kudos to Trump.
Give credit where credit is due.
It's like the WHO's pandemic treaty.
They get shut down, they keep coming back, they're relentless.
They're going to keep coming back and changing the whole thing or maybe just bringing it up as it was for another one of these things.
And it's kind of interesting because we've kind of seen this pattern.
And of course, Zbigniew Brzezinski was all about this in terms of creating the Trilateral Commission and these different economic areas, creating trade groups that would essentially have some economic control over people, and then unifying those trade groups into a political entity.
That's the pattern that we saw happening in Europe with the common market then becoming, you know, going in with more and more economic control in the marketplace, and then finally coming in with the Euro and things like that.
Now they're moving to, you know, after they establish more and more political control of people, probably all of this push with Ukraine and everything is to give them a European army, which they denied they were doing as Brexit was happening.
Reports, they wanted a European army.
Oh, no, no, we don't want that.
Now they're talking about it openly.
And so we see these types of things.
It's kind of interesting that the UN has taken, you know, you can unify people economically, then unify them politically to create this large governing block and then bring those blocks together into a world government.
But in the case of the UN, they're doing it politically and now they're moving into the economic stage, kind of doing it in reverse order.
Either way, it's that same goal of consolidation and centralization, isn't it?
Yes, and using as an entering wedge things like trade and economics.
In effect, as of course, the Europeans did way back in the 1950s.
Oh, no, no, this isn't political.
This is just about free trade and open borders, and obviously, who can oppose such positive-sounding axioms?
But, of course, as it turned out, it was about much more than that.
And then they're trying to do the same thing here in the New World they did with the FTAA of a generation ago that ultimately kind of fell apart.
They tried to create, you know, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, you know, this free trade zone, ostensibly free trade zone.
And that eventually didn't work out.
But they're still working on the fact that we have a sort of a customs agreement, a trade agreement amongst the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
There are souls out there who want to transform that into some kind of a broader North American political union.
And people like Mark Carney openly talk about that.
And his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, up in Canada, are very well aware of this.
And certainly some of the people in Washington as well know that that's the real goal.
You use trade and you persuade people of the advisability of having open borders and free trade, and then you work toward the political convergence.
That's right.
And of course, I remember when Trump said, I'm going to get rid of NAFTA.
We don't like NAFTA, so I'm going to do the USMCA.
And replace it with something else.
Yeah, and you guys were spot on at the New American and saying that, well, the USMCA is not really fundamentally any different from NAFTA.
There's just been some tweaking of some other stuff.
So what do you make of the fact that Trump began this administration by attacking a lot of the same agreements that he was boasting about in his first administration, coming after Mexico, coming after Canada, even accusing Canada of bringing fentanyl into the country?
What do you make of that?
Has he changed?
Does he not want to have this unification that is there with Mexico and Canada, this economic unification?
Well, there's some evidence that he did learn some things during his four years in the political wilderness.
Obviously, certainly experiencing the brunt of lawfare and all that had an effect on him.
But more than that, I suspect that he's actually done something that he probably hasn't done a lot of in his adult life, and that's done some serious reading about some of these issues.
This is the one thing about moneymen, a lot of moneymen, they're so busy doing what they do, they don't take the time to really read.
And so while I think a lot of Trump's instincts are spot on, he's instinctively hues toward freedom and so forth.
He doesn't really have a strong understanding of a lot of these issues, and he relies on his advisors and this kind of thing.
And he does seem to have a different crop of advisors.
His first time around, he bought into the idea that, well, I need to surround myself with policy experts.
And in practice, that usually means people of CFR and trilateral pedigree.
And that's why we had that revolving door of Secretary of State and this kind of thing under the first Trump administration.
And he was constantly feuding with his cabinet.
That's because he'd appoint people who were basically globalists and elitists and thought differently than he did.
But they were sold to him by his circle of advisors.
Well, you need to have, you know, you're a newcomer to Washington, so you need to have these seasoned experts.
You know, it'd help me quickly realize, I don't like what they're telling me to do.
And so this time around, he does seem to have made wiser choices in that regard.
In fact, fortunately, he's got this one really bad hangover, Peter Navarro, who came up with those reciprocal tariffs on that chart that was just utter nonsense.
You know, Navarro's been in prison too, so he's got a chip on his shoulder.
So maybe he's trying to get away from that.
I mean, Scott Bezant is the one guy in this Trump administration that is kind of cut from that cloth, this kind of establishment type guy.
But most of the rest of them are, you know, I mean, there's a lot to quibble with, certainly.
Trump is certainly no Ron Paul or Thomas Massey.
But, you know.
Yeah.
And, you know, you get back to Scott Bessant and where we began with Argentina.
When you look at this, the beginning of his $20 billion bailout to Argentina, this hasn't gone very well.
Actually, the peso, the Argentine peso, has continued to go down in spite of his financial levers that he's been pulling.
Yeah, well, and again, much as I love Millay and Argentina, we have no, you know, the president has no constitutional power to bail out other countries even via currency swap.
I mean, Clinton did that with Mexico back in the mid-1990s and got into all kinds of trouble.
He used the exchange stabilization fund in his case to just up and send money to Mexico to stabilize the Mexican treasuries and all that type of thing.
Whereas, you know, Besson said, well, it's a currency swap.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that we go in and buy their worthless currency with our somewhat less worthless currency.
So, you know, that's pretty much what's happened.
And yeah, I mean, we'll see.
The elections in Argentina are coming up this weekend to kind of come full circle and we'll see what happens.
Millay will be president one way or the other for two more years, presumably.
But whether or not he has a more compliant Congress is very much in doubt at this point.
We'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and again, I think a big part of what we're seeing happening in the backfire of Besant's policy is the de-dollarization that's going on internationally.
People are walking away from the dollar because it was weaponized by Biden and continuing to be weaponized by Trump.
They want a different financial system.
They're moving to gold or they're trying to establish BRICS or something like that.
And just to, I think it is also a harbinger of the declining power of the dollar financial system that's there.
What do you think?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, I mean, you know, this is something, again, as with military power, we're loath to admit that the state of affairs that we have all come to accept as natural for the past several generations, to wit, that the dollar is going to be forever and ever, amen, you know, the world's dominant currency, that that could ever change.
But again, you know, the Germans thought the same up through World War I.
I mean, you know, the German mark was, you know, alongside the British pound.
And we get to, you know, also adduce the example of the British pound, which up until World War II was the world's great currency.
Where's the pound today?
Yeah.
Where's the mark?
Well, the mark doesn't even exist anymore.
We know about German hyperinflation after World War I.
So, yeah.
And here's the thing, too.
You know, the triggers for calamitous hyperinflation, you know, Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation, usually are major traumatic events like a civil war or a major military loss.
And so if the other things that we talk about come to pass, you know, if the civil unrest continues, if the United States gets involved in some kind of major world war starting over Taiwan or Ukraine or something like that, you know, these things could all prove the death knell to dollar supremacy.
Yes.
Because it would cause, you know, potentially at least, you know, could just absolutely detonate a bomb in the middle of our American sense of confidence and complacency about the dollar.
I think a lot of people see that.
I think that is fundamental to a lot of this move into gold and silver away from the dollar that we're seeing.
And of course, again, the weaponization of this financial system that we set up, we're destroying it ourselves, even if we don't do it from within.
But there's a lot of issues that are coming up within.
So very important that people keep their ear to the ground.
And one of the great places to do that is at thenewAmerican.com.
Thank you so much, Steve, for joining us.
Our guest has been Steve Bonta, who is the publisher of The New American.
And it's always a pleasure to have people on from JBS.
I just want to see more stories out there about the concern about the federalization of policing and other things like that.
Because I tell you, I'm just going back.
I talk about it constantly.
I said, well, the John Burke Society was like 60 years ahead of the rest of everybody when they talked about the dangers of the federalization of the police and the militarization of the police.
You know, back in the 1960s, support your local sheriff or whatever.
That is more important than ever, I think.
And we've got to be careful that we don't move into that because of a particular goal that we have.
We have to be mindful of the precedents that we're setting and of the means that we're using because those are going to be the things that are going to be used to hang us when the administration changes as it inevitably will.
Yes.
So thank you so much for joining us.
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