Michael Tracey On Trump & Kamala's Interviews and Israel Policies; Ukraine War Developments & U.S. Sanctions on Chinese Companies; Richard Hanania Interview
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Trump & Kamala’s Interviews and Israel Policies (3:15)
Interview with Richard Hanania (49:15)
Outro (1:23:48)
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Welcome to another exciting edition of System Update here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
System Update, as you know, airs nightly every Monday through Friday here on Rumble.
Glenn is once again away.
I guess he decided to belatedly withhold his labor for Labor Day, so you are again stuck with me, sadly.
And if that troubles you, I don't necessarily even begrudge that.
But yet, here I am!
So tonight, I'm going to do my best to serve you, because that's what I live to do.
And we are going to discuss a couple of items that I think are of public interest.
Did I mention that I'm Michael Tracy?
If not, you should be aware of me by now, I would hope.
Although you might be better off just forgetting about me.
Tonight we're going to first discuss some of the media appearances that our two glorious presidential nominees, Donald J. Trump and Kamala D. Harris, is that her middle initial?
I think so, have graced us with.
Kamala Harris only provided her first interview of the entire campaign last week and Donald Trump has been gathering up a little bit more extensively, and there are a couple of items there that I think you'll want to be apprised of.
Then we're going to go through a couple of developments around Ukraine and discuss those developments with Richard Hanania, who is... I don't know what he is exactly.
He's an all-purpose commentator, polemicist, He might even say troll, but in an endearing way.
It should be enlightening and informative.
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So for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting now.
Okay, so Kamala Harris couldn't be bothered to do any media interviews of any substance, or really at all, as so Kamala Harris couldn't be bothered to do any media interviews of any substance, or really at all, as far as I I
I was at the Democratic National Convention recently in Chicago, covering that for your viewing pleasure, and Donald Trump Has done modestly more interviews and media appearances, but the content and the substance of those particular interviews is slightly questionable and or at least worth interrogating a little bit further than what you might get on the surface.
So I want to go through a couple of those for your, again, extreme viewing pleasure.
So on Sunday night, Trump appeared on Mark Levin's weekend show.
Mark Levin is a longtime conservative talk radio host.
He also hosts a show on Fox.
And just to give you a little bit of context around the relationship between the great one Mark Levin and his nasally voice extraordinaire, I guess I'm not one to talk in terms of Focal performance or aesthetics, but as somebody who was a longtime connoisseur of right-wing talk radio, I always found it difficult to even listen to him for more than five minutes just because his voice was so unbearable.
But be that as it may, Trump has developed a very fond and fruitful relationship with him, it would appear.
And I want to give you some context about that relationship because it's just too amusing not to share with you.
So here's Trump and Mark Levin at a White House Hanukkah We have a man that I have, by the way, great respect.
Mark Levin.
Where's Mark Levin?
Where is Mark?
He's over here.
Lee, send him up here, will you please?
Mark, come on up.
Come on up here.
We have a man that I have, by the way, great respect, Mark Levin.
Where's Mark Levin?
What a show.
Where is Mark?
Where is Mark?
He's over here.
Lee, send him up here, will you please?
Mark, come on up.
Come on up here.
The great Mark Levin.
And by the way, come here.
Say a couple of words.
It's an honor to be here with the first Jewish President of the United States.
And if he isn't, he should be.
I want to thank you.
I want to thank you for everything you have done for the Jewish people.
I want to thank you for everything you've done for the Jewish people's ancestral homeland.
You are going to be remembered there for a thousand years.
And I want to thank you for what you've done for the United States of America.
And I want you to know that we will not leave our general on the battlefield without our support.
Here he is.
God bless you.
Thank you, man.
Thank you.
Fantastic guy.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mark.
Okay, so as you might surmise, that's definitely indication that Mark Levin was gearing up to do a really tough interview with Donald Trump after having blessed him as the savior of the Jewish people, will be remembered for a thousand years as This biblical monumental defender of Israel and really ought to be known as the first Jewish president.
So there you have that's Mark Levin.
And Mark Levin had Donald Trump on for an interview this past Sunday.
And I do want to note that obviously there is a massive disparity between the number of interviews or podcasts or whatever other kind of media appearances that Donald Trump has done as of late versus Kamala Harris.
So that is, I guess, a point in Trump's favor.
But when you delve a little bit into the content of these media appearances, I guess you might argue it leaves a little bit to be desired.
And so let's first go to this clip of Trump and Mark Levin discussing issues around Israel.
It's amazing.
If you go back 15 years or even less, the strongest lobby in that sense in the United States was Israel.
You couldn't say a thing about Israel, Christian or Jew, you couldn't say anything about today.
It's like under siege.
You look at AOC plus three, you look at these people, the way they talk about it.
And then you see Schumer, who's become a Palestinian, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, he's actually become like a Hamas agent.
Schumer, how did that happen?
Let me ask you about that.
You see the outbreak of anti-Semitism in our streets.
It wasn't happening when you were president.
It didn't happen when I was president.
But you signed an executive order.
the Civil Rights Act to cover Jewish students and their free speech, which Jewish students are using now to defend themselves in these Ivy League colleges.
We did a lot for Jewish people because we were able to, you know, we were able to turn that tide, but now it's turning back.
And Biden does nothing.
How a Jewish person can vote for a Democrat, but specifically somebody like Kamala, she wouldn't even meet with Bibi when he was, look, he came over, he's the prime minister of Israel.
He's in a war.
We're heavily invested in that war.
People are dying.
October 7th was a horrific day.
Just horrific.
And now you see people that are picketing, they're saying no such thing ever happened.
You know, they did that with the Holocaust, too.
They said there was no Holocaust.
But this one was right next to us because we saw it.
We saw it.
You saw it.
Everybody saw it.
They saw it.
I don't imagine they aren't thinking straight.
They must know it happened.
But I think they're interviewing people that are rioting.
What about October 7th?
It never happened.
Now, either they're conning us or they really believe it never happened, and that's maybe worse.
Okay, so if I were sitting in Mark Levin's chair, I might have a couple of follow-up questions to a variety of assertions that Trump made there.
First, Trump started out with this curious lament that he's repeated a number of times.
Which is that he is lamenting that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is no longer as omnipotently powerful as it once was back in the glory days of yore.
And he is holding himself out, Donald Trump, as somebody I guess who will restore this untouchable power of the pro-Israel lobby.
Among other curious aspects of that claim is the idea that the pro-Israel lobby has significantly diminished in power.
Really?
Has the Biden administration since last October done anything, really, other than usher countless armaments and other sorts of materiel to Israel for use in its pulverization campaign in Gaza?
Hasn't the Biden administration very dutifully and aggressively sent things like carrier groups into the Eastern Mediterranean to provide naval support and other forms of support for Israel to supposedly deter Iran, which may or may not have succeeded thus far, at least in terms of forestalling some of the more cataclysmic outcomes of a confrontation at least in terms of forestalling some of the more cataclysmic outcomes of a
Hasn't the pro-Israel lobby, in particular AIPAC, intervened incredibly aggressively in domestic U.S.
politics, particularly in this last election cycle where they've done something extraordinarily unusual, which is contribute to the defeat of two Democratic incumbents, Jamal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri,
On the ground that those two Democratic members of Congress have been insufficiently supportive of Israel and have trafficked in rhetoric that these pro-Israel groups find to be unacceptable.
So where is this diminishment in the prestige or in the power of the pro-Israel lobby that Trump is lamenting?
Hard to say.
He has very gleefully accepted The massive funding of Miriam Adelson, whose late husband Sheldon Adelson was one of the top funders, if not the top funder of the Republican Party over the past several election cycles, including of the Trump campaigns in 2020 and 2016.
And she's pledged to spend at least $100 million on supporting Trump in 2024.
So what exactly is Trump demoting there in terms of this Tragic loss of the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.
Hard to say, hard to get into his head, but maybe if somebody was interviewing Trump who hadn't been honored by Trump at a White House Hanukkah ceremony and bestowed on him this great blessing as Trump being the savior of the Jewish people and of Israel, maybe they would have had the presence of mind to ask him a couple of more slightly adroit follow-up questions, but that Clearly it was not Mark Levin's MO.
And then Trump also got into this, if you'll notice, tangent about there being this supposed new wave of Holocaust denial that's sweeping the U.S., where you have these Massive hordes, these unruly hordes of deniers who are saying that the October 7th attack never happened.
Now, I don't deny that there could be a small subset of people who, in some form or fashion, denied that the October 7th attack happened.
But do those people have much prominence in the American political system?
How about in Congress?
How about in the mainstream media?
Who is this foil that Trump is trying to set himself up against and claim that he's going to defend the Jewish people in defiance of?
A little bit difficult to pinpoint that with any specificity, but Mark Levin again was clearly not interested in sussing out any additional details on that score.
And what are you going to do?
I mean, Trump, as we've established in previous episodes that I've hosted on this show and other appearances that I make on various platforms, Trump really is running on the most hard line.
And you could say extreme pro-Israel platform of any major party nominee ever.
And that's all the better for somebody like Mark Levin, who welcomes that and celebrates that.
But I guess if you had a bit more critical distance from Trump, you might want to ask at least one or two follow-up questions, parsing out the details of Trump's position.
Yet, alas, we were not treated with such follow-ups.
Now there was another interesting aside that Trump had in this interview, and don't worry, everybody.
I know you're all going to be screeching that I'm focusing on Trump.
Yeah, he does happen to be the Republican presidential nominee.
We will do our due diligence, or I will, with your support and get to Kamala.
In due course, but there are some other aspects of the Trump interview that I did want to touch on, so you'll have to bear with me if you're a Shukrin Zamaga person and tolerate another minute or two of non-ass kissing coverage of the Republican presidential nominee.
I know that's difficult for some of you out there.
But here's Donald Trump making An admission, I would call it, that he's also repeated on a number of occasions, including in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July and then in a handful of other interviews, that really has gotten Startlingly little attention from either left-wing media or anti-Trump liberal media or from the sycophantic ass-kissing right-wing media.
So if you're somebody who's in the detached middle and you would just like some reasonably incisive coverage of what the former president and potential future president would do if he wielded power again, you're out of luck.
So, let's go to Trump, also with Mark Levin, discussing the issue of Afghanistan.
The worst, in terms of prestige, was Afghanistan.
It was handled so badly.
I'm convinced Putin would have never gone in if I were president.
But, even with Biden as president, if he didn't do the Afghan... and not getting out.
I was getting out.
I would have been out faster than him.
I'm the one that prepared to get out.
But I would have kept Bagram, the big Air Force base, which is one hour from where China makes its nuclear weapons.
It's a massive base that we built many years ago with billions and billions of dollars.
Runways are the most powerful anywhere in the world.
They can carry more cargo than any other runway.
You know, the massive, thick concrete goes down to Almost China, which is right next door.
But big, heavy slab concrete runways.
You almost couldn't build something like that today.
We walked away and one day it's gone and China now occupies it.
We were one hour away from where they make their nuclear weapons.
Okay, so what is Trump admitting there?
Apparently he has no compunction about it, so maybe I shouldn't even characterize it as an admission, as though he's Hesitant to reveal this information.
He seems totally open and candid about it.
But he's saying that he never was going to withdraw from Afghanistan or his intent, evidently, was never to withdraw from Afghanistan.
It was never to end the Afghanistan war because he's saying that he was planning to maintain a U.S.
force presence at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which is this giant air base that takes a lot of personnel to maintain, particularly in hostile territory, which it would have been in because the Taliban Was not going to ever embrace the continued presence of U.S.
forces in Afghanistan.
That's what the whole 20-year insurgency was about.
With the U.S.
as an occupying power in Afghanistan and attempting to fend off Taliban insurgents by fruitlessly Funding and arming and training the Afghan national government for 20 years, which of course dissolved pretty much the instant that the U.S.
withdrew in 2021.
And Trump at various points had claimed that he was always going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
He in fact had initiated the diplomatic process, which I credited him for at the time, of starting up Negotiations with the Taliban which under the George W Bush era for instance would have been almost unthinkable Because remember the amount of the mantra at that time was we don't negotiate with terrorists, but Trump broke an orthodoxy to some extent and did begin negotiations with representatives from the Taliban in Doha and
That resulted in something called colloquially the Doha Grievance in February of 2019, sorry, February 2020, that Trump and Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, brokered with the Taliban.
And in that agreement, it was stipulated that what the U.S.
would do was eventually withdraw all, that's a direct quote, all U.S.
forces from Afghanistan, including all remaining bases.
To the U.S.
would withdraw its forces from all remaining bases in Afghanistan.
That was in this Doha agreement that the Trump administration brokered with the Taliban.
Now in 2021, Biden saw through that agreement.
He did withdraw from Afghanistan.
Now there are complaints leveled about the manner in which that withdrawal was conducted.
But I always found those complaints a bit odd because it seems like the only successful thing that the U.S.
did in Afghanistan for at least, I don't know, 19 and a half years was withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.
And of course, that didn't occur in the most seamless and carefree way possible.
And there were, unfortunately, some U.S.
troop casualties in August of 2021.
But obviously the U.S.
efforts to sustain and subsidize a proxy or really thick leaf of a government in Afghanistan did not result in anything of note because it dissolved almost immediately upon the U.S.
withdrawal.
So now Trump is saying that he was never going to withdraw in the first place.
He was going to renege on that agreement, maintain a large U.S.
troop presence at A massive U.S.
airbase, supposedly because Trump wanted to keep those forces there to intimidate China, which Trump claims has a segment of its nuclear arsenal in rough proximity, an hour away.
I don't know if that's by drive or by car, you know, by horse and buggy or by F-16 flight, but who knows?
He doesn't really spell out any specifics.
But the bottom line is that Trump has been over and over again very candidly admitting that he was never going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
And he gave a bit more detail on this back in June on yet another friendly Fox appearance.
So here's Trump back then.
You know, we were going to leave, but we're going to keep Bagram, which is one of the biggest airbases in the world.
It cost us billions and billions of dollars to build many years ago.
But we were going to leave because of China, because it's one hour away from where China makes its — forget about Afghanistan.
It's exactly right next to China.
It's exactly one hour away from where they make their nuclear weapons.
Isn't that a great thing?
We're going to keep it.
We're going to leave 4,000 people and keep it, and keep it strong, right?
They gave it up.
They gave up everything.
Okay, so that's Trump saying 4,000 U.S.
troops would have been in a combat zone in perpetuity if he had gotten his way, which is totally in contradiction to the terms of the Doha Agreement that he at least ostensibly brokered with the Taliban back in February of 2020, and then was Carried to fruition by the Biden administration.
Now I don't know if Trump genuinely never intended to withdraw from Afghanistan or if he kind of retrospectively modified his position because he had to situate himself in opposition to Biden And Trump just kind of reflexively opposes everything Biden does and therefore had to come up with this new convoluted rationale for why he would have kept a permanent U.S.
occupying presence in Afghanistan.
And some people will try to say, oh, are you saying that World War II is still going on because the U.S.
has permanent bases in Germany or in Japan?
No, that's not an app parallel because however feckless the Japanese and German governments are, They have active basing agreements with the United States to keep those bases in their host countries.
As far as anybody can reasonably ascertain, basing agreement between the U.S.
and the Taliban, because one of the conditions that the Taliban insisted upon in those negotiations and which was codified in the Doha agreement was that all U.S.
forces would be withdrawn from the country, hence the 20-year war, right?
That was kind of the sticking point.
So there's no real comparison to be made between the U.S.
having these long-term agreements for basing arrangements at various countries in its orbit, in its sphere of influence, like Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.
Then you can have all sorts of critiques of those long-term U.S.
force deployments in those countries.
I would probably share some of them.
But it doesn't make for an app parallel between what Trump is now saying that he would have Implemented in Afghanistan.
That would have been an active combat situation in perpetuity because under Trump's administration, under Obama's administration, etc, that Bagram Air Base was routinely attacked by the factions within Afghanistan that wanted to expel U.S.
forces like the Taliban or other groups.
So, I mean, I just would, my plea would just be for this issue to get a little bit of coverage somewhere.
In terms of the right-wing media, all you get are these really implausible rationalizations of how this is obviously what Trump was planning to do all along, even though it's the diametric opposite of what he was claiming he was going to do.
Or, you know, it's America First to keep thousands of troops in combat in Afghanistan in perpetuity.
And then the anti-Trump liberal media, they don't seem to care about this particularly either, perhaps because When Joe Biden did preside over that withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, people might forget this, but his approval rating plummeted.
It was the first time that the media actually ferociously criticized Joe Biden at any length, and Biden's approval rating really never recovered from that.
So, you know, why is it that nobody really is particularly curious about this seeming about face on Donald Trump's part?
I don't know.
You tell me.
Now with that, anybody who's hackles are raised because I'm focusing on Donald Trump, you can rest easy because now I am going to get to Kamala Harris.
I do try to, you know, do somewhat even handed coverage of both candidates.
I know that's A really befuddling thing for a lot of people.
But, you know, I'm not a partisan Republican.
I'm not a partisan Democrat.
I'm not voting for either candidate.
I'm not voting for really anybody.
I'll probably write in for Fred Flintstone.
So I think he would probably do a more competent job than any of the candidates on offer.
So, you know, little old me, what do I do?
I do something old fashioned, like, you know, try to critique all the major party candidates, you know.
So if you find that flustering, I deeply apologize.
But let's go to Kamala Harris because she did finally appear for a semblance of an interview on CNN.
And most of it was totally useless.
Most of it was vapid and substance free and just an opportunity for her to repeat her talking points to Dana Bash, who she had selected for the interview because Dana Bash is one of the chosen few who Can moderate a debate as she did with Jake Tapper in June that faithfully led to Biden withdrawing.
So I guess Kamala Harris thinks she maybe owes something karmically to Dana Bash for orchestrating that debate that led to Kamala getting swooped into the nomination with almost no scrutiny.
But here's Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on CNN also discussing the issue of Israel.
Would you do anything differently?
For example, would you withhold some U.S.
weapons shipments to Israel?
That's what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.
Let me be very clear.
I'm unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel's defense and its ability to defend itself.
And that's not going to change.
But let's take a step back.
October 7, 1,200 people were massacred.
Many young people who are simply attending a music festival.
Women were horribly raped.
As I said then, I say today, Israel had a right, has a right to defend itself.
We would.
And how it does so matters.
Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.
And we have got to get A deal done.
We were in Doha.
We have to get a deal done.
This war must end.
And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out.
I've met with the families of the American hostages.
Let's get the hostages out.
Let's get the ceasefire done.
But no change in policy in terms of arms and so forth?
No, we have to get a deal done.
Dana, we have to get a deal done.
Okay, so the only word that Kamala uttered throughout that entire interview that is of any significance is when she said no to Dana Bash doing a modest follow-up by asking her, would there be any change in policy with the Biden-Harris administration vis-a-vis Israel?
Kamala Harris said no.
Now that ought to have been the most blindly inference that anybody could have possibly made about Kamala Harris's candidacy all along.
And yet, For weeks, we have been told by various progressive or left-wing activists and also their adjuncts in the media that Kamala Harris was bringing a new vibe to the issue of Israel-Palestine or Israel policy writ large in the Middle East.
And therefore, maybe there was some hope, as they saw it, that Kamala Harris would represent a break From the status quo of the Biden-Harris administration.
Why anybody thought that was at all feasible?
I don't know.
You'll have to ask them.
I think they're in a strange frame of mind if they ever felt that was a reasonable possibility.
And they probably wanted to simply have a tactic for galvanizing support from more disaffected elements of the Democratic Party coalition to support the Democratic nominee to stop the big menace that is Donald Trump, as they would allege.
But Kamala Harris, she's finally, I guess, ending her brat summer in which she had no interviews up until this CNN interview last week.
So she's wringing out her summer, relaxing maybe ahead of Labor Day and now in the aftermath of Labor Day and giving thanks for how brat her summer was.
And if you're not familiar with the terminology brat, I have covered it rather extensively on the show in the past.
It's the Charlie XCX album that catapulted Kamala into the status of some sort of pop culture icon because of her vibes.
And how she was unburdened by what had been, including Joe Biden, I guess, Joe Biden being a burden for her, for having picked her as vice president and having stepped aside unceremoniously after being forced to do so by Democratic operatives and pundits and elected officials who basically orchestrated a push to overthrow Joe Biden and
Coronate Kamala Harris with no scrutiny virtually at all.
And so what these people who were hopeful and pining and aspirational about Kamala Harris were trying to suggest for weeks, including at the Democratic Convention, according to some of my discussions with people who attended, was that Kamala Harris could be pushed.
She could be urged or encouraged to develop a new position on Israel from Biden.
And that should warm the hearts of everybody who maybe has some concerns about the policy status quo in Israel with tens of thousands dead, Gaza pulverized, war always threatening to break out in an even more dramatic fashion with Lebanon, always some possibility of some cataclysm with Iran.
Perhaps Kamal Harris would chart a different course.
Based on her brat ways and her, I don't know, amusing cackle or something.
And so one of the people who embodied this view was a gentleman by the name of Jeremiah Healy, who is a Minneapolis city councilman.
He, sorry, I keep saying Jeremiah Healy, who was the former mayor of Jersey City.
No, not Jeremiah Healy.
Jeremiah Ellison.
Pardon me.
Amusing confusion on my part.
Jeremiah Ellison.
He's the son of Keith Ellison, who's the Attorney General of Minnesota.
And Jeremiah Ellison was an elected uncommitted delegate to the Democratic Convention.
And we encountered him at the Democratic Convention.
We were covering it last month.
And I asked him what he sought to gain by his presence as an uncommitted delegate in terms of extracting some kind of policy concession from Kamala Harris.
And here's what he had to say.
What impelled you to become an uncommitted delegate?
Your father's obviously a Democratic Attorney General.
You're a Democrat.
So you're kind of going against the grain, in a way, to put yourself out there as an uncommitted delegate.
What impelled you to do that?
Yeah, well you know, early on, even as somebody who is a representative within the party, and who has been a lifelong Democrat, I was finding myself really frustrated by what's happening, by the genocide that we're seeing in Gaza.
And my options were to check out, which as an elected official felt like not an option, right?
Or to find a way to engage with the party in a way that will hopefully generate some policy change.
And and uncommitted was a real easy pathway for that.
Right.
It's it's it's a party.
This is the process that the party set up.
We're participating in that process in the hopes that we can create some policy change and walk out of here excited by our nominee.
But we can't walk out of here excited by our nominee at the expense of lives in Gaza.
OK, so there's Jeremiah Ellison.
Suggesting that what the uncommitted delegates, the handful of 40 something delegates who got elected as uncommitted delegates to the Democratic Convention, what they could collectively do is try to force a policy shift, not a vibe shift, not some intangible impression not a vibe shift, not some intangible impression that maybe eventually, theoretically, Kamala Harris could do something differently than Joe Biden, but a tangible policy shift.
Reflecting their grievances with the status quo under the Biden-Harris administration in relation to U.S.
policy toward Israel.
And as the cookie crumbled, the uncommitted delegates got absolutely nothing.
I covered this for Newsweek, actually, also at the Democratic Convention, and you could maybe look up that article.
I should have made it into a graphic, but hey, I work with what I've got.
On short notice, the uncommitted delegates succeeded in extracting virtually zero policy concessions from the Democratic bigwigs who were running the convention at Kamala Harris's behest, including totally trivial, petty, inconsequential concessions like having a Palestinian American give a vetted speech in which the Palestinian American
Was set to endorse enthusiastically Kamala Harris.
Even that minor pittance of a demand was not acceded to by Kamala Harris or the DNC.
Forget a policy shift.
I mean, that was totally out of the cards, clearly.
They didn't even get these totally inconsequential symbolic Concessions.
And so, Kamala Harris, in that Dana Bash interview, where she acknowledges, forthrightly, to her everlasting credit, that of course she has no, direct quote, no, policy differences with Joe Biden regarding Israel.
That was the only illuminating aspect of that entire interview as far as I could tell.
Now again, Should have been overwhelmingly painfully obvious to anybody who has a brain in their heads that Kamala Harris, of course, was not going to depart.
Substantively from Joe Biden on issues of Israel.
In fact, I mean, there's even a prospect that she could be more hard line than is then Joe Biden, just given her potential perceived need to demonstrate her Foreign policy bona fides and her toughness, whether as a woman or a POC or whatever other nonsense.
So there's a possibility that she could be even more hardline on Israel than Joe Biden, although that would be difficult to do.
And with Donald Trump as her opponent, who's running on this truly extreme platform of Of pro-Israel agitation.
I don't know why a thumbs up just appeared on the screen.
That's amusing.
I guess that's a deity somewhere out there giving me kudos for all the lucid points that I'm currently making.
So thank you for that.
Maybe I'll say a prayer in thanks of whoever graced me with that accolade.
So whoever thought that Kamala Harris was going to depart substantively from Joe Biden on issues of Israel has no leg to stand on, never really did, but now it's been confirmed.
So that's just wonderful.
So Donald Trump has given us more material to work with in terms of the media appearances he's made because we only have that one like, you know, 20 minute interaction that Kamala and Tim Walz did last week to go on in terms of her Media availability.
So Donald Trump has done more and lo and behold, today he appeared on the Lex Friedman podcast.
And there's an interesting shift in how these appearances are characterized because as Lex Friedman tells us, here's how he describes his interview with Trump.
Do you know anything about psychedelics?
So I'm not a drug guy, but I recently did ayahuasca.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of people that speak to sort of the health benefits and the spiritual benefits of these different psychedelics.
I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms perhaps.
Now I know you don't, you stay away from all of that stuff.
I know also veterans use it for dealing with PTSD and all that kind of stuff.
So it's great and it's interesting that you're thinking about being more accepting of some of these drugs which don't just have a recreational purpose but a medical purpose, a treatment purpose.
So we put out a statement today.
We're going to put out another one probably next week.
More specific, although I think it's pretty specific.
And we'll see how that all goes.
That's a referendum coming up in some states, but it's coming up, and we'll see how it does.
I will say it's been very hard to beat it.
You take a look at the numbers, it's been very hard to beat it.
So I think it'll generally pass, but you want to do it in a safe way.
OK, so that's a different clip from the Lex Freeman Trump conversation.
Actually, that's the most interesting part.
So I do have to praise Lex Freeman for bringing up the issue of psychedelics with Trump.
That alone, on principle, is incredibly entertaining and amusing that Lex Freeman would try to get Donald Trump to comment on the issue of psychedelic drugs.
Now, it is a more than legitimate issue, actually, and probably ought to get more discussion.
Definitely ought to get more discussion because there have been state-based campaigns in the past couple years to legalize psychedelic drugs.
I myself, I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge, and I wrote about this at the time, went in March to one of the very first legal psilocybin mushroom clinics in the United States, in Oregon.
And I ingested a legal dose of psilocybin mushrooms, and it was great.
I mean, it actually is something that people should research and investigate for themselves.
Don't just run out and start gobbling any mushroom you see.
Do some research.
Get into the right frame of mind if you feel like it's something you might want to pursue.
And it has all kinds of salutary effects in terms of cognition, in terms of just getting a grasp on your psyche.
I don't necessarily even disagree with Lex Friedman that if, you know, members of Congress or people in elected office treated themselves as a good person.
I'm not sure that Donald Trump fully grasped what Lex Friedman was asking him about.
Donald Trump apparently has come out in favor tentatively, somewhat tepidly, of marijuana legalization.
That's interesting.
That's actually something that I would applaud.
I think resisting marijuana legalization is folly at this point.
And I mean, who could seriously argue for police to be busting people anymore?
for possessing marijuana.
That seems pretty absurd.
So Donald Trump has recognized that political reality, it seems, and given a somewhat qualified endorsement of marijuana legalization.
I think there's a referendum in Florida that he's supporting in 2024 to legalize some degree marijuana legalization or legalize marijuana to some degree in Florida and perhaps other states.
So there you have it.
That's the one standout portion of the Lex Friedman interview.
But the one thing I wanted to note is how the interview was characterized.
Not as an interview, meaning Lex Friedman and other people who are promoting this stuff, they don't even call it an interview.
They call it a conversation.
So here's how Lex Friedman introduced his encounter with Trump.
The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this The Lex Friedman Podcast.
So interviews have been replaced, it would appear, by Conversations in terms of this alt-media ecosystem, right?
Because politicians, even presidential nominees like Donald Trump, apparently no longer really have to subject themselves to actual interviews, where you have somebody who's reasonably informed about the subject matter, they ask follow-up questions, they push, they prod, they try to elicit new information.
Not that Lex Friedman is a dummy, I'm sure he could have done this to some extent, but He asked a bunch of pretty banal and dopey questions.
So here's an assortment of these questions that I wanted to just present to you.
And then I guess you could draw your own conclusions because sometimes, so here, yeah.
So there's, there's Elon Musk also calling it a conversation, notably not an interview.
That's out of fashion.
Conversation with Friedman and Trump.
So here's a bunch of the questions that Lex Friedman asked of Trump in the interview that came out today, or the non-interview interview.
Conversation, I should say.
Politics is a dirty game.
How do you win that game?
Huh, profound.
You said that you love winning, and you have won a lot in life, in real estate, in business, in TV, in politics.
So let me start with a mindset, a psychology question.
What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?
Again, enthralling.
Here are some other questions.
You've been successful in business.
You've been successful in politics.
What do you think is the difference between gaining success between two different disparate worlds?
Another insightful question.
How do you think you'll do in the upcoming debate that's in a few days?
Really holding his feet to the fire.
Lex Friedman also asked him, what are you doing usually when you're composing a truth?
Are you chilling back on a couch?
So the truth is the name for a tweet or a post that appear on the truth social platform that nobody uses other than to monitor what Trump is saying.
Additional questions.
The country seems more divided than ever.
What can you do to help alleviate some of that division?
Oh, isn't that nice?
Isn't that...
Touching.
From my personal opinion, Lex Freeman said, I think you are at your best when you're talking about a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side.
Not so much a question there, I guess, as a statement.
And he also asks, what gives you strength when you're getting attacked?
You're one of the most attacked people in the world.
And finally, again, ending on a note of profundity here, one of the tragic things about life is that it ends.
How often do you think about your death?
Are you afraid of it?
So you can see why Donald Trump would obviously be more than happy to do a conversation with Lex Friedman or other of these podcast hosts, who I don't even necessarily disparage.
I mean, people can have different approaches to how to engage with the media ecosystem, right?
But if this is a substitute for actual interviews, Whether it's with Trump or Kamala Harris or Biden or anybody, then the public is really at a deficit because Lex Freeman really did not ask any pressing follow-ups, not try to elicit any new information.
And you know, he's not a journalist, so maybe that's not his role, but I mean, you would like to see at least some moderately competent journalistic interviews with the presidential nominees.
I know that's, Maybe a crazy request for me to make, but I don't know.
It seems pretty standard, but not anymore in the current climate, it would appear.
So there you have it.
That's Lex Friedman, and that was him regaling Trump with lots of interesting questions.
In their conversation.
So conversations now taken over and have supplanted interviews which we might be a little bit more primed to want in the event that there's a desire out there for questions to be put to the Presidential candidates in the public interest.
So I believe we could be going to our first guest now or only guest really of tonight.
I want to go to Richard Hanania.
Hey, Michael.
Hey, Richard.
I don't know how to introduce you or how to describe you.
You have lots of titles.
So I just kind of gave you a smorgasbord of credits and let people draw their own conclusions.
Yeah, I write articles and I'm on Substack, and that's what I do with my life.
So yeah, there's nothing else needed.
Okay.
I do similar things with my life, so we're in the same creditable bucket.
And then I also do stuff like this.
So here I am.
Okay, so Richard, I want to go through with you a couple of things.
I did read a post of yours recently where you chastised me.
That's a great offense.
For having the audacity to point out that Donald Trump basically followed a more or less conventional foreign policy, particularly with respect to Ukraine, and yet a lot of his followers and admirers have these fanciful notions of him departing dramatically from foreign policy consensus and kind of project that onto him and have these fanciful notions of what he would do in a second term.
So I want to play for you a clip.
This was Trump on the Lex Friedman podcast, which we just discussed.
Hopefully we have this.
Maybe I didn't even post it into the document.
Anyway, that's okay.
I'll just describe to you what Trump said to Lex Friedman today, which is basically he said, like Lex Friedman asked him a very anodyne question about how he would negotiate some sort of resolution to the Ukraine war.
And Trump said, I'm not going to tell you.
Because he has to keep that under wraps interminably, right?
And because he doesn't want to give away his negotiating card or show his cards, so to say.
We're now past Labor Day, which is like the traditional beginning of the big campaign season, and nobody really has a clue what exactly Donald Trump would do to supposedly end the Ukraine war.
You have to basically read the tea leaves, Or speculate or project.
And here's a clip I do want to show you.
So this is one of the clues that we have to latch on to if we want some notion of what Trump may do.
Here was his former National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien, back in June on Face the Nation.
And Robert O'Brien is Reputed to potentially be getting another high profile job in a forthcoming Trump administration So let's go to that video and then we can react to it These countries are relying on Russian energy to run their economies.
We need to increase our energy production.
We need to sanction the Russian Federation Central Bank, which Larry Kudlow and I called upon the president to do before the invasion of Ukraine, and start cutting back on Russian oil sales.
Keep in mind, Margaret, we're the first administration to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians.
The Javelin missiles would stop the Russian invasion to start with.
And I give the Biden administration credit for getting some aid afterwards, but it was always too little too late.
Well, we need to bring Vladimir Putin to the table, and the way to do that is what Larry Kudlow and I called for, and what President Trump has called for, is to put massive sanctions on the Russians to bring Putin to the table so we can have a negotiated peace treaty.
We've got to stop the killing in Ukraine.
We've got to stop the killing of Ukrainians.
We've got to stop the killing of Russians.
And we need peace in the world.
And our weakness, there's too little too late telling the Ukrainians they can have some weapons, but they can't have others.
They can use some weapons, but they can't use others.
The half-measure sanctions.
None of that's helping end the war in Ukraine.
That's a lack of leadership under the Biden administration.
Trump will get this war settled very quickly.
Okay, so that's a clue from Robert O'Brien, who is the former National Security Advisor under Trump, again slated to potentially become, to occupy some other high-profile role in the next administration, saying that what Trump is going to do, apparently, is quit the half measures.
Of the Biden administration by putting limitations on Ukraine's ability to use various U.S.
armaments to wage the war and also to ramp up the sanctions on Russia, including by sanctioning the Russian Central Bank.
So if people disagree and think that's not what Trump is going to do, OK, provide some countervailing evidence, because Trump won't reveal it himself.
So in the meantime, we're all left to, I guess, do some informed speculation.
So what do you make of that?
Yeah, so I wasn't exactly chastising you, Michael.
I was sort of agreeing with you and trying to provide an explanation as to this sort of puzzle that you see where these mega people who dislike the war in Ukraine, who don't want the United States involved, always end up supporting Trump.
And, you know, they were disappointed through the last administration.
They're probably going to be disappointed this administration, assuming Trump gets elected.
And every indication is that is that is the case.
So, yeah, I don't think Trump, you know, there's no guarantees in foreign policy.
Somebody who doesn't disagree with you, who actually believes that Trump is going to take a less hawkish stance to Ukraine is Robert F. Kennedy, who says that that's one of his sort of priorities.
It's free speech.
It's Ukraine and it's health as a general matter.
And so he believes this.
So many people within the Trump sphere, Tulsi Gabbard and these people who are supposedly more anti-war, that they are their Trump supporters and a lot of people like Tucker Carlson, obviously.
But then you have, yeah, people like Robert O'Brien.
Mike Pompeo was pretty much, like, the only guy who worked in the Trump administration who ended up on good terms with him, who he didn't hate by the end, who was, like, in, you know, top levels of the state or, you know, NSC or defense.
It's very few who he didn't end up just hating, and Pompeo ended up being one of them.
And so, yeah, I mean, every indication is that Trump is a creature, to a large extent, of the Republican establishment, like a lot of his energy online.
and among the public comes from these people who are anti-interventionists, who are nationalists.
I call them gribbles, conspiracy theorists.
That's a little bit more disparaging.
But basically, these people are different from the Republican establishment, right?
But those are the people that Trump usually gives into, right?
He picks a vice presidential candidate.
This type of answer.
Maybe he threw sort of a bow to these anti-establishment people.
But like staffing in the last administration, like who he appoints as judges, like conservatives have a infrastructure that Trump needs support from.
So like he needs to make Fox News happy.
He needs heritage.
America first people the American first think tank in order to staff as an administration And so like there is no like right-wing think tank that is doing that is close to Trump that is in Trump's orbit That is doing things that is calling for a less escalatory stance when it comes to Ukraine So I agree with you I mean, I think that we're probably gonna get much that was similar to the first Trump administration and a second one Yeah, I don't know if you recall this but a couple of years ago.
I think it was 2021 or 2022 actually I I went and covered a big policy summit in D.C.
of the America First Policy Institute, which were former Trump administration officials who formed this think tank.
It's basically a government-in-waiting in anticipation of a second Trump term.
People can go look up my articles at the time.
I guess I should have pulled up a link to that.
But it was all standard, fair interventionism, That you would associate with just the mainline Republican Party, except it was branded as America First.
I mean, you can brand, you can stamp the brand of America First on anything, apparently, and people will just eat it up and credulously affirm that as a legitimate label.
And sure enough, the head of America First Policy Institute was Linda McMahon.
Who served in the first Trump administration as the small business administrator.
And lo and behold, a couple of weeks ago, Trump named Linda McMahon as the head of his transition team for a second administration.
So it's all kind of come to pass.
You always get the details first if you follow me, MT, and maybe to a lesser extent, Richard.
But yeah, I mean, this was all painfully predictable and foreseeable.
There's no mystery here.
So, regardless of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
incoherently says, I mean, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., not long ago, and maybe we'll cover this a little bit more in depth on a forthcoming show, should I have the honored opportunity to have one, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as of May and June, I think, was blaming Donald Trump for causing the Ukraine war by
Ruining relations with Russia by throwing out arms control treaties by arming Ukraine and on and on and on.
And now he's just had this crazy epiphany based on some friendly chat that they apparently had at Mar-a-Lago or something with no accompanying details as to what so seismically changed in the interim.
So, yeah, I mean, what do you make of the about face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Who claims that his big signature issue is Ukraine.
In fact, that's what RFK Jr.
says compelled him not just to drop out of the race and leave the Democratic Party, which he already did 10 months ago, but endorsed Donald Trump.
They're so aligned on Ukraine.
My question is, and I know I'm tedious with this with people, what in the record actually substantiates this claim that Trump has this Anti-interventionist disposition on Ukraine.
We just heard from his National Security Advisor, who could very well be in the next administration, saying that Trump is going to take off the gloves in Ukraine and do even harsher sanctions on Russia, which is the opposite of what these Ukraine-skeptical MAGA people claim to want.
But I guess maybe this is a little bit of a liberal cliché on my part, but I guess really the facts on this issue genuinely don't matter.
Yeah, I mean, as a childhood wrestling fan, just the fact that Vince McMahon's wife has such a prominent role to play in the Trump transition, I mean, I just find that sort of endlessly entertaining.
She did get chokeslammed and given the stone-cold stunner a few times, so maybe that has limited her cognition.
I just love that.
There's no stories about if there's something that professional wrestling might get out of the federal government that this relationship could bring to them.
I don't know if there's been anything written about that, but it's sort of a It's sort of a fascinating angle, what the McMahons are doing here.
But yeah, RFK, I mean, I don't know if Ukraine is his main issue.
He almost brings up health when I see him speak.
It's always, you know, it's MAHA, make America healthy again.
Yeah, he's doing these like poetic, spiritual platitudes on the true meaning of MAGA now, which I guess for him is MAHA.
And so his whole alleged independent campaign for president Now is seeming to amount to him potentially getting some low-level bureaucratic job at the FDA to analyze the toxins in soil or something, which I don't necessarily denigrate.
I mean, who doesn't want fewer toxins in soil?
It's a bit of a letdown if you actually bought his rhetoric as to how historic and earth-shattering his independent candidacy was going to be, but he actually does mention Ukraine.
Like when he got up on stage in Arizona and endorsed Trump, he said the three main issues that were compelling him to do so were, and I think you mentioned before, free speech, Ukraine, and then health, whatever that means exactly.
So Ukraine is in the top three.
Yeah, I mean, according to reporting, RFK basically just went to MAGA because, according to what he said when he dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris wouldn't even meet with him.
I think this is this thing where, like, the Democratic Party is just sort of closed off to sort of what RFK represents.
And so, like, imagine Kamala took a meeting with him and said, you know, I'm going to appear on stage with you, RFK, and maybe adopt a few of your talking points.
You know, he could have easily gone in the other direction, right?
I mean, I think that he's angling for influence.
You can disparage him for that, and you could say, well, he's just sort of selling out on one's power.
Or you could say, well, if you're a believer in RFK's political ideas, you could say that he's just doing the right thing for his own issues.
But either way, that's how he ended up in the MAGA camp rather than the Kamala Harris team.
And, you know, he was reportedly angling for HHS secretary and, you know, they wouldn't make that kind of commitment to him.
You know, and so like he has this kind of, you know, I think that's better than what he could have got with Kamala, which is like, you know, talk to the hand, maybe meet with a low level staffer.
With Trump, he gets to be on stage with the guy and he gets like some, you know, he gets to be this honorary member of the transition team along with Tulsi Gabbard.
There's no enforcement mechanism, right?
There's nothing that he can hold Trump to.
He doesn't have, you know, he doesn't mean anything.
If Trump wins the election, I mean, Trump is going to be relying on the national security bureaucrats.
republicans and the conservative movement uh what rfk brings him i don't know uh and so i think this is you know this is sort of rfk he's trying to have influence by being close to trump it doesn't add any sort of value to what you think you know if you're trying to estimate what trump is going to do on ukraine rfk believing him doesn't do much because rfk was going to end up going with whoever just made the best offer to him which isn't much but you know he wants to stay relevant yeah
and that that offer apparently is that there could be some fda panel that rfk jr could be on to do like vaccine inquiries, which actually Trump offered to RFK Jr.
when he was president-elect in January of 2017, or that's what RFK reported when he went to Trump Tower for a meeting.
That month, nothing apparently ever came of it.
So maybe there's a bit more teeth behind that.
But if that's the sum total of what you thought that an RFK campaign was going to bring to our benighted polity, that he could maybe run an FDA panel?
I mean, OK.
I doubt he would get that.
That would be such a political headache because everyone in the FDA would revolt.
I mean, the entire scientific community would revolt.
I mean, Trump sometimes doesn't mind pissing people off, but he's not in the habit of just like creating political headaches that don't benefit him in any way.
So like, I would be surprised if he actually got much of anything from the Trump administration.
Yeah, we'll see.
So Richard, as you might be aware, Joe Biden is still in office technically.
It's hard to be aware of that, yes.
Yeah, I mean, who can really confirm that?
I'm not sure.
We get occasional clips of him mumbling a couple of words here and there.
So he's there in some capacity.
He sent one of his slightly younger and maybe slightly more articulate emissaries to China last week.
Yes, Keith Bradshaw for the New York Times.
Have you made any progress with China in discussing what might be a possible resolution for the war in Ukraine?
Ukraine actually in China.
So I wanted to get your reaction to this.
Yes, Keith Bradshaw for the New York Times.
Have you made any progress with China in discussing what might be a possible resolution for the war in Ukraine?
Thank you.
I can't say that we did make progress on that issue.
The PRC has been very public in its view that the war should end through diplomacy.
They've laid out various principles, both unilaterally and in separate communication with the Brazilians.
We had the opportunity to exchange views on the war against Ukraine over the course of the last three days.
We didn't reach any particular plan with respect to diplomacy, in large part because the United States very rigorously adheres to the simple maxim of nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
So ultimately, it will be up to Ukraine to decide how it wants to proceed with diplomacy and negotiations.
Yeah.
OK, so there's Jake Sullivan.
Going to Beijing, obviously discussing a variety of issues, but Ukraine comes up because China has stuck to what Jake Sullivan seemed to think is this totally unreasonable and obstinate view, which is that perhaps there should be a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine.
And he contrasts that with what apparently is the stubbornly clung to U.S.
position, which is nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, which Tony Blinken and Biden and other administration officials have just repeated as this cliche for now two and a half years.
And what does that mean exactly?
It means that Ukraine is the one calling all the shots policy-wise.
And even though the U.S.
is subsidizing and enabling the very continued existence of Ukraine as a state, what Jake Sullivan is saying, even at this late day, that was August of 2024, it's nothing about Ukraine.
Without Ukraine, the U.S.
has no policymaking agency apart from whatever Zelensky and his compatriots decide that they want to do with regard to Ukraine.
And it couldn't be more, you know, muddled and banal at this point, I think.
So, I mean, based on that, like, what is the current U.S.
position on Ukraine so far as one can be ascertained with Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it didn't seem like Sullivan was saying much there.
Okay, the Chinese made it clear that they want to end the conflict through diplomacy.
I mean, that sounds sort of complimentary and polite to the Chinese.
No, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
That's also a platitude.
I mean, they say this all the time.
Zelensky has agreed to a meeting and November I mean apparently wants the Russians there I don't know if that meeting has been actually scheduled yet, but that's what they're that's what they're pushing for And so like whether like maybe there is like some movement behind the scenes I don't know like they wouldn't tell us this right it just seems like they're just saying the same things over and over But, you know, whatever.
The fact that there is going to be a meeting, apparently, and that Russia and Ukraine will both be there is indication we might get something out of this.
But still, again, it's like, you know, they're not leaking whatever changes are happening behind the scenes, if there are any changes.
Yeah.
So in the meantime, there's been something of a uproar among pro-Ukraine pundits and commentators because now they're getting ready, I guess, of betraying Ukraine, despite the unprecedented quantity of armaments and aid of other kinds that have been dumped into Ukraine for the past two and a half years, but it's never enough.
And so here's a representative example.
This is a guy, Phillips O'Brien, no relation to Robert, as far as I know, who styles himself as some kind of war pundit, war analyst.
And he had a mournful tweet today that I want to pull up.
He says, sadly, Ukraine is learning what many other states and peoples have learned over the previous decades The United States is not a reliable partner ally and almost never lives up to its rhetoric.
Its foreign policy practitioners are a study in failure.
So he's lamenting that because Joe Biden has not yet agreed to authorize the longest range strikes By Ukraine using U.S.
munitions into territorial Russia, that amounts to a betrayal.
And there's the wonderful tweet that I'm sure was composed with tears in the eyes of that individual Phillips sitting in Scotland somewhere, notably not on the front lines of the Donbass.
And he's saying that the United States has delivered to Ukraine yet another hard lesson in the unreliability of the U.S.
as a partner.
And here's also what was being reacted to.
This was Joe Biden, who somehow was prompted to answer a question by some correspondent from Azerbaijan, who was in Washington, D.C., throwing questions out about Ukraine.
So this is Biden yesterday, September 2nd.
So let's hear that.
On Ukraine, have you seen Ukraine's request to leave restricted American weapons that they can fly back on the Russian faces?
I made it clear when we proposed when we leave the point of the peace.
Mr. President, how is it to be back on the campaign for now today?
Feels good.
How do you feel about Pennsylvania?
We've got some out of a thousand here.
We have to pick up the government.
No, why not?
Because we're so dangerous, now we get to go out.
We're so dangerous.
How do you feel about Pennsylvania right now?
I feel very good about Pennsylvania.
I feel really good for Pennsylvania.
Thank you. .
Okay.
Okay, so there's Joe, all smiles, saying he feels real good about Pennsylvania.
It feels great to be back on the campaign trail.
And also, he's already said what the U.S.
will allow and what it won't with regard to these longer-range strikes that I guess Ukrainian officials have been lobbying and agitating for.
There was actually a delegation a week or two ago of Ukraine officials in Washington, D.C.
on one of their incessant lobbying trips.
Trying to persuade American officials to allow them to strike even deeper into territorial Russia.
Biden already gave a preliminary authorization to that effect back in May.
But again, never enough.
And the Ukrainian officials apparently think that if they were just given even more authorization that that could turn the tide in the war.
So now I think you have this dynamic where despite this massive support and subsidization The US has given Ukraine for the past two and a half years.
There's this growing clamor of discontent that ultimately the US is abandoning or betraying Ukraine.
So that's how it's going to be.
Described, I guess, by these people.
Yeah, this is the this is the story of the entire conflict, right?
I mean these, you know, there's always more you could give Ukraine and there's always more sort of permissions that you can give with regards to how they use the weapons that the West provides.
And look, the Philip O'Brien argument is like a perspective on this war that is not necessarily ridiculous, right?
These people believe that If you support Ukraine to the hilt, you give it whatever it wants, you let it use the weapons how it feels is best, you let it do aggressive incursions into Russia and so forth, the best will increase pressure on Putin.
And that will make a negotiated settlement that is favorable toward Ukraine more likely.
If not, Ukraine eventually winning.
I don't know.
Russia collapses or something happens.
They decide it's not worth it.
Right.
And so that's the Philip O'Brien perspective.
I mean, it's not like an argument that makes no sense.
Right.
And, you know, the idea that there will be the idea that the people on the other side say is, well, there will be escalation.
You know, you could have a nuclear war.
Russia could, you know, throw missiles at the NATO headquarters at Brussels or something like that.
Nothing like that has happened, despite a lot of escalation, a lot of people warning that things were going to be really bad.
I mean, the war has stayed, for the most part, almost exclusively confined to Ukraine, and now it's made its way into Russia.
Well, I mean, just to stop you there for a second, Richard, it is notable that we have What is effectively a US-backed invasion of Russia underway, where Ukraine has seized territory, you know, a non-insignificant swath of territory, installed what we're told is a commander for that occupied territory.
And Zelensky has indicated as of today in a new interview that he intends to retain that territory, you know, into the indefinite future.
I wouldn't totally poo-poo everybody who has projected the possibility of escalation, right?
I mean, you and I had lots of discussions about the Ukraine war all throughout its duration.
If I had said two years ago, in one of those discussions, that eventually there would be a U.S.-backed invasion of Russia, people might have found that far-fetched.
And yet, it's happening.
Yeah.
But what if they told you there would be a U.S.-backed invasion of Russia?
And Russia did not do anything in response.
I mean, there have been these sort of red lines.
There have been retaliatory strikes.
I mean, there was just a big strike on a Ukrainian military institute today that had the biggest death toll of the entire of the war thus far this year.
They hit back on Ukraine.
Yeah, no question, but they hit back on Ukraine.
The worry of the escalation people, and when they try to argue from an American first perspective or from this perspective that's worried about American national interests, what they say is, you know, they're going to draw us into the war.
U.S.
troops will be there.
I know we've had, you know, intelligence officers and so forth or it will go into you know poland or there will be some kind of baltic thing or there will be something in nato or russia will i don't know cut off the power or do some kind of kind of attack on the west or something like that that's what people are that's like the warning from people who are like okay it's not american interest to be involved in this and none of that has happened i mean there's something like there's like i think there was a there's some sabotage in europe like a few little a few little things right but i think the people like philip o'brien
i think they feel vindicated on this point that russia does not want escalation and they'll hit ukraine and i think the idea from the perspective of these people is like okay that's what ukraine wants they want to fight the war they want to win uh Uh, they'll absorb whatever hits that Russia has back.
And you know, it's escalation in a sense, but it's not escalation in the sense of a lot of people.
What would, what would disprove Philip O'Brien's point?
Would it have to be outbreak of nuclear war?
Okay.
So like we won't even be around to tell him that his point wasn't vindicated.
There are, I mean, there are steps between this and nuclear war, right?
Like my point is that the escalation ladder has been climbed.
Yeah.
We haven't gotten to the point where there's direct, State-to-state warfare between the United States and Russia, but I'm sorry, anybody who's of sound mind, if they had been told like two years ago or three years ago that there would be a U.S.-sponsored invasion of Russia, they would have found that crazy.
And even if it hadn't yet resulted in a direct retaliatory strike, like on Washington D.C.
or something, like those steps up on the escalation ladder have been climbed.
We haven't reached the ultimate culmination yet, but do we want to get to that point?
We don't, right?
But there's, like, you know, there's, like, you know, conventional attacks on, like, you know, on countries, you know, within NATO.
There is, you know, even, like, really hardcore, like, cyber attacks.
You know, there's a lot of stuff you could potentially imagine, right?
It doesn't happen.
And so, like, you're going to say, well, you know, one day it might.
One day it might.
I don't know.
I think the Phillips O'Brien have been looking at Putin this whole time.
And, you know, they've been saying, like, there's all these, like, Russia, for example, annexed all these territories um right they supposedly annexed uh her song and zaporizhia along with the next couple hunts and then ukraine takes and then like some people thought at the time i thought this was possible that like there was a red line and like that was part of russia so if ukraine goes into those territories and tries to take back what it's lost uh there's going to be a nuclear attack or some kind of major you know something like that something got that level ukraine took back her son they took back parts of kharkiv
even though that wasn't uh that wasn't uh uh uh annexed to russia and then now right now ukraine is in russia itself right and It's in parts of part of the Kursk region.
And like nuclear weapons are not being used.
I mean, there's not like, you know, there's not like a kind of like, you know, anything that's like escalatory that like anyone in the West would notice if it wasn't for what they see on the news.
Right.
So that's the argument.
It's like you might want to say, well, it's not worth it.
It's just not worth it.
Like it could happen there.
And I think Philip O'Brien would say, like, just support Ukraine and like let them fight this out because, you know, the threat of escalation out there.
With support Ukraine, meaning authorize Ukraine to use U.S. armed forces.
armaments to strike Moscow?
To do what exactly?
I mean, where does this end?
Yeah, I mean, he would, that's what he would say.
He would say, let them do what they want to do, right?
The only end point then, per his calculus, is effectively for the U.S.
to facilitate some kind of regime change in Russia.
Is that the end point?
Maybe, maybe.
Or, you know, just give, you know, somehow the Russian army collapses or falls apart or like they have some kind of agreement where you know it ends up i don't know like i think there are a lot of people will not be happy unless ukraine takes back every inch of territory including crimea so different analysts are going to have uh different um perspectives right and some of them are just going to say well support ukraine and they need to be in a position a better negotiating position maybe that involves giving up crimea and maybe that involves giving up some some places too uh but
But I think the argument that these people can be united in saying, look, the more territory Ukraine has, or the more that it's able to defend itself, and this has got to be true, whenever they do start negotiations, let's say it's November, the better off they'll be.
Now, Russia, of course, says, now that you're in Kursk, now we cannot possibly negotiate with you because that's a big thing.
Of course, they would say that.
They're not going to say, oh, now that you've taken Kursk, now we're going to sit down and have a reasonable conversation.
But the hope is like Russia thinks like, OK, like this is actually hurting us in some way that we care about.
And maybe we have a reasonable.
I don't know.
Like that could be.
That's a possibility.
It could be Ukraine is just the same place as like these Philip O'Brien types who want to take back every inch of territory and just don't care what happens.
That's also a possibility, too.
There's sort of no way to say from.
Well, it just seems to me that every escalation in tactics, whether horizontally or vertically, to use the jargon around escalation theory, Can be justified on the grounds that, oh, it will ultimately, hopefully put Ukraine in a better negotiating position.
So yeah, I mean, I guess evaporating the entire Russian military and maybe destabilizing the entire country or Dislodging its government that could also theoretically put Ukraine a superior negotiating position but it seems like there's just always a built-in like justificatory framework for anything that Ukraine wants to do no matter how audacious or risky with us backing that can be justified in the name of eventually having this future
Settlement.
So that seems like, you know, that's kind of just self-reinforcing logic in a way that's like divorced seemingly from the actual trajectory of the war.
I mean, Ukraine has long claimed that it was going to be having these summits or that it was theoretically open to negotiations with Russia on the condition that Russia withdraw all its forces from Ukraine, pay reparations, Like Putin turned himself over for prosecution, all these like obviously unfeasible demands that the Russian government in its upper echelons would never voluntarily accede to, at least based on everything we know.
So it just seems like a recipe for just prolongation and perpetuation of more or less the status quo with potentially some Zigs and zags where it could lurch into some kind of escalatory situation with, I mean, there's only been an invasion of Russia happening for like a month.
I mean, who knows what's going to happen next month?
I mean, this is my refrain for a long time, but I don't know.
It seems like people aren't cognizant of it anymore.
And the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, they just muddle along with these cliches that give no indication whatsoever that they've done like a minute's worth of introspection on the policy trajectory.
Yeah.
I mean, so you say, well, you know, the, the policy seems to be just let Ukraine do whatever they want.
I think they wouldn't, you know, I think a lot of these Ukraine hawks wouldn't disagree with you.
I think they would say that they're the country that got invaded.
Uh, you know, they want to fight for their country.
therefore you know we support them because they're in the right and you know that they are the ones best positioned to know and and to decide what they want to sacrifice in order for what ends and what kind of negotiations and what kind of positions to take that's what they would say and you'd say well we have to worry about escalation and they would maybe say like maybe some would say we don't care about escalation we're ready to fight with russia others would say well you know putin also doesn't want escalation he doesn't want a nuclear war
um you know it hasn't shown like he's got an appetite for that so far for expanding the war uh beyond ukraine uh so you know keep keep supporting ukraine that's the argument that's the philip o'brien hawkish argument It's just about, you know, probability estimates of the odds of escalation.
All right.
Well, Philips O'Brien, if you're listening, I hereby invite you to come on System Update in the near future, and we can decide if Richard has given an accurate encapsulation.
I think it's probably on the mark, but there's more to, there's always more to discuss.
So, Richard, we will leave it there for now.
People can look up your website.
It's richardhanania.net, if memory serves.
No, it's .com.
Oh, it's .com?
Okay, I'm .net.
I got shafted with the .net URL for mtracy.net, which I don't promote enough on this show.
mtracy.net.
And yeah, we will talk again soon.
Thanks, Michael.
All right, take care, and thank you for joining System Update.
Signing off for now.
And, you know, if you didn't enjoy this episode, too bad, because I may or may not be back in the future, so... All right.
