Rex Jones and Tim Tompkins expose how Trump’s tariffs—meant to protect U.S. jobs—backfired, crushing farmers with $10B+ in lost soybean exports due to GMO rejection, while slashing manufacturing competitiveness like coal’s failed revival. Walmart, Ford, and Volvo now raise prices as costs spiral, mirroring 1930s missteps. Allies like India pivot toward China and Russia amid sanctions, accelerating America’s economic decline. Jones mocks symbolic wins (e.g., Tim Cook’s gold plaque) over policy failures in Syria and Venezuela, warning that short-termism and propaganda-driven economics risk long-term global irrelevance—unless media finally demand accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, Tim, after disconnecting from news for years and then going back into the geopolitical situation, really just like one or two years ago is when I decided to consciously start paying attention again.
I've been kind of shocked and dismayed at what we've seen across the globe.
And domestically here in America, we don't get the real news.
We are the most propagandized people in the world.
We are fed whatever our politicians want to feed us to get elected in that next election cycle.
And that's what the gray area, that's what this show is all about.
Well, yeah, I mean, you've got issues that are happening internationally where like I think everybody kind of understands what's happening on that scope.
But I don't think I haven't really seen in the news too much of the actual things that are happening here domestically.
I think what we should do is I do want to go, let's watch this clip because this kind of shows what's happening here and how it feels for the farmers out here.
And then even countries like China, we look at, we point out, they don't want to take our soybeans because there are a lot of them GMO and harsh pesticide.
So these guys are already having a super hard time finding ways to sell their product in foreign markets.
Dust Bowl, then you also had the tariffs that we tried to do at that time period.
I mean, they tried to play the same playbook at that point in time, and it ended up messing up the entire country because then it caused a lot of the same issues right now that we're seeing live in 2025.
And we're still living in an economy, or we were living in an economy even like a year or two ago that was dominated by the post-COVID era, by all the fake money that was printed, essentially.
All these retail chains like Target, Walmart, they had massive overstock.
So they were able to absorb those costs in a way that they're really not able to do anymore.
And people still expect that.
So I think that's a very interesting thing to look into, right?
Because we're living in an age now where we're five years removed from the pandemic.
And that's a long time.
That's half a decade.
And you kind of blink, you close your eyes, and these things happen.
You don't notice, but we're here.
Everyone's always like, oh, you know, we're just going to wait for the next year.
And things continue to get worse and get worse and get worse.
And with Biden and what he was doing, you know, I'm very critical of Biden, but I would say he really exposed us as a military power across the globe.
Trump is really exposing us or for being a lack of an economic power, right?
Because we don't have the ability to have all this leverage.
It's kind of like a mouse barking at a tiger type of situation versus all these places, even these poor countries, they have the ability to make things.
We don't.
And this effort to kind of snap our fingers and return back to an age where we have the manufacturing power and we have the dominant ability to just print this money, it doesn't work together.
The two ideas are not congruent.
So you talk about these companies that are leaving here or deciding not to build factories here.
So, I mean, you've got parts that are coming international, just like I said with the farming equipment.
I mean, you've got all these different components that come from different parts.
You've got raw materials that go in.
You've got transportation costs.
So if you stack all of that up, and not even just that, I'm talking labor with a lot of these places.
They've moved them internationally for a reason.
It is expensive.
It is expensive for us to be able to actually, we have all these W-2.
We've got people on healthcare.
We've got an expensive healthcare system, which we won't get into, but you've got all of these factors stacked on top of each other for another show for sure.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, but all of that means that if we were to make them here, then you're going to see the cost of that as a labor cost go into the final product.
You know, it's interesting that you bring that up because it makes me think of our military equipment, right?
So we have the ability to produce an amount of missiles in a year that Russia can make in two months, right?
And you think about it and you look at the situation, you go, we have the most powerful economy.
We put the most money into defense.
Why can't we just churn these things out?
Well, the system is designed to be broken, right?
It's not designed to work.
These companies are extracting the maximum amount of capital they can and producing really like a mediocre, dismal product.
It's almost an exact parallel of our healthcare system.
I know we're talking about private industry today, and that's the topic of the show.
But if you look at what's going on on a government level, the things that are publicly funded by us, such as military defense and healthcare, it's really bad.
We pay the most to get a mediocre product.
And we're seeing that in the private market even more skewed.
We're paying the most to get a horrible product, right?
You have for the first time the inflection where now there's more people looking for jobs than there are jobs available.
And you've got all of the mess that's going on with like the jobs reports and things like that.
I mean, boots on the ground, you can clearly see that there's an issue.
There's a massive issue.
We can all see that there's a massive issue.
At the same time, you've got Apple who's saying, okay, we're going to move our glass manufacturing here into Kentucky, which, by the way, that doesn't happen overnight.
You're talking about years and billions of dollars worth of effort that it takes to bring all of that here into America.
But you look at us, and every four years, eight years, there's a new guy.
So if you're looking at the situation critically, these other countries are just able to work us because they're actually able to do strategy as opposed to the tactics that we try to impose.
Like we might try to impose a new tactic, like the tariff is a perfect example, right?
But we don't have any sort of grand strategy because what people run on when they run against the guy in office, they go, We're going to do it completely different because it's not working out.
But all parties, all people involved, all the politicians, all the administrations, they're doing the same thing.
This is what makes me angry because you build for 10-year plans.
You don't build for next week.
So if somebody can come into the White House the next day and they can say, hey, you know what?
With the stroke of a pen, we're just going to sign this off and we're going to remove the tariffs.
We're going to remove all of these different things.
And then what you just spent the last three years building, this massive complex, you've now put yourself at a disadvantage because you've already built this thing here and now your competition is right back up and running overseas.
And judges have said things and Trump says the judges aren't valid and they go back and forth.
And it's just like, you know, Congress was supposed to be the only place that could declare war, but now the president can attack whenever he wants.
It's an emergency.
It's an executive order.
So I get to do it.
We get to do it.
And when you are critical of the administration for doing things like this, people look at you and they go, you're anti-American.
You're un-American.
Support our president.
Support what they're doing.
You know, I may not, I mean, I like the president, but I respect the president.
And I used to hear that a lot with like Obama, like back in the day.
Like people would still have, you know, respect for the president and like Trump's first term, like people hated Trump, but still respect for the office.
We've really reached a point to where the office is mutated into it is the government.
The executive branch has far more power than the legislative or the judiciary.
And like, I don't know how I feel about that right now, but going into the end of 2024, going to the election, I was convinced that Kamala was going to start World War III and that if Trump was in office, you know, at least there'd be a little mini boom, you know, and something good would happen for the economy.
No, what we've done now is there's now a real case scenario for bricks.
I mean, I would have never said this five, 10 years ago.
I'm like, oh, this is the fact that China, Russia, India, Brazil could ever get together with being so vastly different in different aspects that I would even consider something like that working out, let alone China being like one of the main backers.
I was like, ah, there's no shot.
But what we've just done in this past, pretty much just this year, it's crazy.
There's so much stuff that's happened in just this year.
And one of our most important allies, India, like we need, we needed them.
I mean, if you think about our main enemy is China, Russia, and we were going to use India as a primary counter in the manufacturing field because they have so much capability and they have the labor that we need.
You've got Apple moving resources over there.
You've got a lot of companies that are diversifying their portfolios in order to make sure that China doesn't have control over the U.S.
Well, and you see the biggest issue that's coming with these 50% tariffs.
Now India has the highest tariffs among everybody.
You would think that China would be the number one spot for the tariff situation, but we've put India in that category somehow.
So I want to go and watch this clip.
This is what their response was this entire time, given the whole tariff situation and that 50% that's being stacked on top of us.
unidentified
The United States has in recent days targeted India's oil imports from Russia.
We have already made clear our position on these issues, including the fact that our imports are based on market factors and done with the overall objective of ensuring the energy security of 1.4 billion people of India.
It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the U.S. should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own nationality.
This is a perfect example of us talking out of both sides of our mouth.
All these world leaders, these are the great powers, the great leaders, the countries that they rule, the European nations, they don't produce anything at all.
They don't make nothing.
They make zero zilch, nada.
They don't have any rare earths.
They don't have any farming.
They don't have any resources.
They don't have any manufacturing.
Germany, the one place that did have a manufacturing base, has become destitute because of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.
And then now it's so funny thinking about this, right?
Because when the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was destroyed, there was a massive denial of who did it for about two years.
It was, oh, like, we don't know how this happened.
Back in 2022, the amount of imports for oil at that time, India had only about 0.2%.
As soon as the Russian war had started, the United States. saw all the instability that happened with all of the markets.
And so in order to stabilize the market, we asked for India to buy all of that Russian oil in order to help us here back at home because we hadn't started really digging and producing that much oil in order to stabilize it ourselves.
So they went from 0.2% and over the course of those three years went up to 36%.
And so now, now that we're sitting here trying to say, okay, well, you're buying Russian oil.
We're going to punish you with a 50% tariff.
But we asked you to do that three years ago under the Biden administration in order to make sure that things were good for us.
When you get elected into any type of cabinet or any position of power, you need to take a class on history.
That way you can learn because somehow we decided to stop learning history and all the different mistakes that we made back in middle school and high school.
That was a very big thing.
But in order to make sure that we don't repeat the same mistakes, that's why we have history in place.
So if we were to have all of our Congress to sit down in a nice little history class and just be like, okay, so you tell me what happened back in the 1920s.
And then we'll go from there.
And then we can kind of really start processing how we make these rules and going forward.
You can't just sit there and slap a tariff and just say, well, now start buying American stuff.
But if it's not as good, are you going to go sit there and buy the pizza around the corner that's not that tasty versus the one that's maybe in the next town over, but like it's got a line out the door and it's got the best pizza in the world.
And the objective reality is the financial facts on the ground.
It doesn't make sense for Americans to do business here.
You know, it doesn't make sense for foreign people to do business here.
Like it's this country is a no man's land.
It's not good for anybody because everything's constantly up in the air.
Who knows what's going to happen next?
Who knows what Trump is going to decide?
Who knows where the economy is going to go?
Who knows what the Fed is going to do?
It's all nebulous.
It's not real.
So in a world of make-believe, in a world of creative Minecraft, Trump can just dump lava all over the place and declare it his world, but it's not working for the people on the ground.
This new generation that we have come across where we have this victim mentality and everybody kind of has this next day Amazon delivery kind of mindset, it's messed with us.
I'm gonna tell you one thing.
In India and China, they have some of the hardest working people I have ever seen.
Mexico too.
And it's hard to compete with that.
There's the reason why we've moved all of these jobs overseas is not just because of price.
It's also because, let's say you go to work.
I'm telling you from personal experience, I've worked in millions, I've worked in hundreds of manufacturing facilities.
I've seen how people work.
You'll be working on a product.
You're going to be doing your job, but then you might sit there and talk to Jimmy for a little bit.
Right.
And Jimmy is sitting there telling you about what happened with his wife and kids this weekend.
How much do you feel like part of this is us being afraid that someone else is either going to take our number one spot or we can't trust Russia and China?
And how much is it the fact of like these people actually want to do legitimate business?
Because I get confused sometimes.
I know China is supposed to be the enemy.
In some aspects, they definitely do things behind our backs.
But then how much of it is legitimate?
Like we want to participate and work together with you.
So all these other countries, they have to play, like I use the Minecraft example, they have to play survival mode.
They have to actually like it matters.
They have to eat.
They have to sleep.
They can't just stay awake all night and fly over the map and do whatever they want.
And that's what we do.
And it's like we're in a race where we have the ability to fly and shoot lasers out of our eyes and run a thousand miles an hour or like going in circles, like we're the best, we're the best, we're the best.
And it's a tortoise versus the hare scenario where we have all the resources here that we need to be the most successful.
The sun rises in the east, they say, and has already set in the west.
This is China's geopolitical moment.
At present, the international landscape is marked by intertwined changes and turbulence, and member states face increasingly arduous tasks in ensuring security and development.
They're just saying, come to us, come do business with us.
We're your friends.
We're happy here.
I mean, what do we have here?
We fly a B-2 bomber over Putin's head.
We're like, you better not.
You better not.
You better not.
These other countries, they don't operate on intimidation like we do.
They operate off cooperation.
Yeah.
And I mean, 20, 30 years ago, even then we couldn't do it.
Even then the decline had started.
But we signed our future away for just a few decades of literally doing whatever we wanted.
And the wealth disparity in America has never been so huge, right?
You look at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
That was a group made up of, I believe, four or five countries in the early 2000s.
And now it's dozens of countries have joined it.
And it's the same with BRICS, where it was just this novel idea of, oh, you know, maybe we'll do this if the, you know, the situation becomes right for it across the globe.
And the situation's been right for it for decades.
Then you had the actual tariff again delayed from the 7th to August 1st.
You had another tariff that was on August 4th, delayed to August 7th.
And then you've got another tariff that was delayed from August 11th and plus another 90 days.
But somehow in this circumstance, we haven't delayed the tariffs on India, but we have delayed the tariffs on China, even though China's importing more and they're more of an adversary.
You know, it seems that the friendlier you are to us, the worse you get treated.
And I think maybe an aspect of why all these other countries are joining things like BRICS and the SEO is because they want to get respect in a weird way.
They're like, okay, we have to do this.
We're forced to do this.
You want us to do this, America?
Because like everything you're doing to us is making us do this.
So you must want us to do this.
I mean, why can't we all just get along?
Why can't America be part of the solution and not be a part of the problem?
We could fix all this right now.
And I'm critical of China.
I don't like their government.
I don't like what they do to the Uyghurs, but they have the ability to build things like high-speed rail, the ability to, Russia has the ability to process oil in like sub-zero temperatures.
We don't have these abilities, right?
We need to work with these countries that can give us this technology.
But the topic, you know, that big military parade that just showed up in China, we can at the anniversary, the 80-year anniversary of the victory in World War II.
We look at that as Americans or not as Americans.
Government looks at it and goes, Well, you know, it was actually America that defeated the Japanese and we did all the things and you should be grateful to us.
And we go, Well, you know, 70% of the casualties in World War II against Imperial Japan were the Chinese.
And if you look at it, the reason why we as Americans have to deal with communist China is because we were against the nationalists in China and we helped them lose during World War II.
We made sure that they were defeated by the Japanese and then the communist Chinese came to power.
So even back like 80, 100 years, we are the problem.
And we also fail to look at the fact of all the instability that we cause in those regions after we go in there, replace the guy, and that guy sometimes ends up being worse.
And then we're like, oh, we got to go, we got to go get another guy.
We can't even honor our own Monroe Doctrine anymore.
If America was going to be imperialist, and I made this point to a few people over the years, if America was going to be an imperialist country, we would operate in our own hemisphere.
We would try to control things here, you know, because at least we're close.
But no, we have to operate thousands and thousands of miles away, and we have to operate in kind of a clandestine and under-the-table way.
We're manipulating people.
We're doing regime change.
We're ultimately run by our intelligence agencies more than anything.
We rely on our ability to kind of deceive other nations instead of even like projecting force honorably.
We don't even do that.
We kind of just kill people and then try to like blackmail them or, you know, like just like try to make them, we make them agree with our worldview when it's very obvious that our worldview is the most dysgenic out of all of them.
Well, I mean, is there any difference between any of our politicians at all?
And I would say no.
And I would say in Trump's first term, he was still a politician, but he was less of one.
He's fully embraced that now.
He's got, okay, okay, I've got this base, this 30% that's just loyal to me.
Whatever I say goes.
And as long as I keep them happy, I have the political capital to, you know, get what I want to do in my administration done and make my friends happy and, you know, make favorable deals for the people that I know.
But the people that he knows aren't the majority of the American public.
And I feel like every group that gets in power is funded by their own group of special interests.
And those special interests get enriched.
But even that has diminishing returns.
They're not able to provide the stuff that they were able to provide like a decade ago to their political donors, right?
So like we're going to be talking about a lot of different topics moving forward in this show, but like this was one that we really wanted to highlight today.
I really feel like going forward, there's this, this mess isn't over.
I mean, we've created such a beast.
The news cycle is about to be hot this entire year.
I mean, as much as everything seems so doom and gloom, that's why we have four-year presidencies and we have term limits for everything.
I think everyone is starting to wake up.
I mean, thank God to Elon Musk for having X.
I agree with you now that that pretty much allows people to take the veil from over their eyes and essentially show that like, okay, this is the reality of what's happening in the world.
And the narrative is no longer being controlled by small interest groups and different people that have their own personal agendas.
I mean, you've got now we are people like us independents who can give their opinion to people out there.
We'll definitely get into the history of internet censorship and all that's happened and all that's changed.
The only positive change that I can see for domestic America is the resurgence of free speech.
I mean, in 2018, the company I used to work for, my father's company, we were all kicked off social media, all like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all platforms within, you know, two weeks of each other, total radio silence.
There was a period of time where you can't say anything that's true about COVID.
You couldn't say that ivermectin was an actual drug that's won the Nobel Prize for how it was used.
You got to say, oh, no, this is this poison.
It's evil because CNN says it's true.
Whereas it's just a 1984 Orwellian scenario that we were in even just half a decade ago.
And I look at how the landscape has changed with Rumble and X.
I look at how people are actually able to communicate freely.
And that does give me hope because we have seen some change there.
But I would say that's one of the only areas that we've seen real change in.
You're told that it doesn't matter until maybe they want to stir some emotion up and they come up with the right calculation formula and they dump it down everyone's throat.
And the issue becomes relevant again for two, three weeks because, ah, it's targeting someone we don't like.
Oh, and it's also easy when you live in extremes to keep people controlled because then you can control the narrative.
Then you can actually tell people what they should be listening to, what they should believe.
And when you talk about the gray areas, then you get to see the perspective on other sides because I always say this one phrase.
Guys, there are local truths.
No matter where you are, no matter what religion you practice, no matter where you're in the world, depending on what your situation is, that is your truth.
That is your belief system.
And if we can't find a way to create a Venn diagram where we find those commonalities and we overlap everything that's happening out here, then it's going to continue to go like this.
This is our first episode, but we're going to keep coming out with every single week new topics, new context, everything that we want to talk about and things that you guys want to hear.
So make sure that you make comments, communicate with us, tell us what you guys want to hear.
You can find us on Gray Area Talks on X, and then we'll also be on Rumble as well.