April 9, 2025’s The American Journal dives into China’s 84% tariff retaliation after Trump’s 104% hike, sparking U.S. threats like delisting Chinese stocks and fines for illegal immigrants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warns of escalation, while Joshua in Georgia alleges China’s covert military and fentanyl threats. Jessica Solce contrasts El Salvador’s Bukele—who crushed gangs with Bitcoin-backed reforms—with U.S. media narratives, suggesting China’s infrastructure aid may outmaneuver Western influence. The episode ties trade wars to broader cultural shifts, from rising political violence to authoritarian overreach, questioning whether America risks losing its global edge. [Automatically generated summary]
The state of California has taken tens of billions of dollars from the federal government providing free health insurance for illegal immigrants in California.
unidentified
We're going to get that money back.
Someone came to you, someone came to me in person and said, I...
I basically am a PR agency, a very high echelon one.
And I was approached by a government agency to create a narrative against you, and it's going to be called your anti-vaccine.
And I turned down the job, but I wanted to privately and secretly...
We couldn't do an email, we couldn't do a phone call.
I had to come to you in person and let you know this, that they're going to come after you and hard.
And I said...
Well, how are they going to do that when I've clearly said in every interview I'm not anti-vaccine?
Like, I'm just telling the story of my child, of what happened and how I'm getting him better.
And they said, doesn't matter.
He said, doesn't matter.
They're going to come after you with everything they've got and they've, you know, they've got the media on their side.
Crashing the markets with their put options, with their panicking, with, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever.
We're all doomed.
And then you look at the actual graph, how much it's fallen, it's nothing.
unidentified
What do you say to people in the public who are concerned now about drug safety, about whether we're prepared for the next pandemic when these cuts have happened so hard so fast?
Yeah, I'd say to the reporters in the room and the lobbyists in the room, I mean, obviously make your case, but I'd truly ask for, as you're making it, a little bit of humility about what the voters were trying to say by putting...
Bobby Kennedy Jr. in this position of power.
The NIH oversaw, and this is just consensus at this point, the creation, the literal creation of a pandemic.
The NIH, whose goal is to promote American health, has overseen a devastation, just an abject devastation in American health over the past 20 years, with disease rates skyrocketing in America, leading the world of almost every single chronic disease, with rates of nearly every single chronic disease being at an all-time high among kids.
Absolutely. Like the idea that Bobby Kennedy should not come in and make dramatic changes to the leadership and the personnel at these authorities that have overseen an abject devastation of American health, which the lobbyists in this room do not have
the humility to admit that we have gone completely wrong.
The lobbyists in this room laughing when we have the sickest children in the developed world.
If you guys, if that is your attitude.
And your attitude is to tell the maha moms that their votes and their voice is not legitimate, that we need dramatic changes to American healthcare.
If you think it is illegitimate for Bobby Kennedy to not make big changes to people like Peter Marks, who once again and again and again went against FDA advisory opinions, who fired the two top vaccine makers, the two top vaccine scientists at the FDA for suggesting that we shouldn't mandate COVID shots for soldiers,
Continually went against expert opinion in favor of the pharmaceutical industry, who many people here were collaborating with him with.
The fact that somebody like that can't be fired, and he can't install tremendous people like Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Oz to start reforming these agencies and put in their people, of course he should do that.
Most people are now awake, the vast majority, but they just woke up.
So they're trying to get their bearings.
And I've also seen, because the leftist corporate Hollywood-style brainwashing and attacks are working on less and less people, now the system is going at it from trying to finance supposed anti-globalist opposition to then go around and try to demoralize people and say Trump's not for real and we're basically all doomed.
And that's the new official point.
remind you of the COVID tyranny and then place it all on Trump's feet right at his doorstep as I've been warning him and others that they would do.
unidentified
It's Wednesday, April 9th in the year of our Lord 2025.
And you're listening to the American Journal with your host, Harrison Smith.
And we'll show you some videos, but they're essentially saying, yeah, just get over here, Xi.
Just fly right over, bend the knee, to borrow a Chinese term, kowtow yourself before America, and we can talk.
We'll talk.
President Donald Trump threatened a 104% minimum tariff on all Chinese goods to come into effect last night at midnight, Eastern Time Wednesday.
Stocks in Asia traded lower when they opened Wednesday after another day of wild gyrations in the U.S. markets with the S&P 500 index closing down 1.5%, bringing its total loss...
Since mid-February to almost 20% nearing a bear market.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, on which many Chinese exporters are listed, fell by almost 4% when trading opened Wednesday, although it rebounded somewhat later in trading.
Again, we'll get into the economic fallout of Liberation Day as Trump takes a sledgehammer to the globalist construct.
Meanwhile... Biden administration concealed congressionally mandated report on earliest suspected American COVID cases.
Seven U.S. service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms in Wuhan in October of 2019.
Seven Americans may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan in October 2019, several months before reported the reported start of the pandemic, according to a bombshell military report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden administration had concealed from the public.
The December 2022 report, which the Biden administration was required by law to release to the public over two years ago but didn't, reveals for the first time seven U.S. military service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms during or after their participation in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019,
contradicting the Biden administration's public claims in 2021 that there was no evidence that any American participants contracted the virus at those games.
The revelation adds to a mounting body of evidence that the virus was circulating in Wuhan for months before China disclosed it to the world in December of 2019 and further bolsters the growing consensus that it could have leaked into the human population from a Chinese lab.
Yeah, we're still talking about that.
By the way, we were reporting on the fact that not only the Wuhan virus had been out since earlier, probably more like September, maybe even earlier June.
2019, but certainly by the time the military games were held, and that's been well known for a very long time, that it just so happened to coincide with these military games, because it was released on purpose, by design, and at a very strategic moment.
So let's just get this out of the way.
We've been telling you since 2020, not only had...
COVID been around since earlier in 2019.
You understand it's called COVID-19, right?
People think it came about in 2020.
No, it came about in 2019 and was released during the military games to infect all the participants of those games.
They went home to their home countries and infected their military.
And it happened to be on exactly the same day that Event 201 was being held.
In a conference room in the John Hopkins Center in New York City because it was released on purpose.
Can we flip to the last chapter of the book when it's revealed that it was all on purpose?
That should have been the name of the show.
Spoiler alerts.
Spoiler alert.
It came from a lab.
It was released way earlier than we knew.
It was human-made.
And it was released on purpose.
Meanwhile, Trump halts federal aid to Maine prisons after state allows man to be incarcerated with women.
The Trump administration revoked all non-essential funding from Maine's Department of Corrections, citing the presence of a transgender inmate, a gender-confused male presenting himself as female, being held in a women's prison.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the move this morning on Fox's...
Fox's morning show, Fox and Friends.
We pulled all non-essential funding from the Department of Corrections in Maine because they were allowing a man in women's prison, Bondi said, while standing on the front lawn of the White House.
She described the gender-confused inmate as a giant 6'1", 245-pound guy who committed a double murder with a knife, stabbed his parents to death, and the family dog.
And then he identified as a woman, so they were letting him be housed in a women's prison, no longer.
Bondi declared.
We will pull your funding, she warned.
We will protect women in prison.
We will protect women in sports.
We will protect women throughout this country.
No more of that.
So they've lost 1.5 million plus in federal grants for allowing trans women in female jails.
Well, what a retarded hill to die on.
What a very, very stupid hill to die on.
You know, it's like, it's one of those things, I don't know why, I don't know why this comes to mind for me, but like if I ever ban somebody on Twitter, I try to do it like,
because I always, what I always picture is like the conversation where it's like, Harrison banned me.
And the other person would ask, why?
And if the answer to that question is like, oh, well, I called him a Jew and I posted pictures of dead babies and said, you did this.
And it's like, ah.
Well, then you deserve to be banned.
Whenever I ban somebody, I picture that conversation and I think if his answer is like, well, I said something terrible to him.
It's like, well, then you deserved it.
Now if it's like, well, I just tried to correct him and he just flipped out on me.
Then you're a jerk, right?
So I'm just imagining the conversation when federal employees are being given their pink slip.
It's like, look, we gotta fire you.
You know, the Trump...
Administration pulled our funding.
We have no more money.
But why?
Because we really wanted to put a perverted murderer in with potential rape victim women in prison.
We refuse to house men with men and instead are allowing clearly male people, just clearly gigantic murdering men to just claim, actually I'm a woman, I'd like to go To the women's prison and then we put them in there.
So that's why we've lost all the funding and can no longer continue your program.
You just imagine those conversations.
You have to imagine the people that are having their programs cut.
Probably not super appreciative of the reason behind it.
Well, I mean, I guess I'm going to lose my job, but hey, at least Ricardo gets to...
Get tampons up his butt, you know?
Who cares?
Just, what a stupid thing to actually fight for.
Meanwhile, Trump admin moves to fine illegal immigrants nearly $1,000 per day if they don't self-deport.
$998 per day they'll be charged if they remain in the country.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin Told Fox News illegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to self-support and leave the country now.
If they don't, they'll face consequences.
This includes a fine of $998 per day for every day that the illegal alien overstayed their final deportation order.
A senior Trump official told Reuters that the administration plans to use a 1996 law to apply retroactive penalties on illegal immigrants for up to five years, which could result in fines over $1 million.
The outlet, which reviewed government emails, said the administration is also considering seizing the property of illegal immigrants who do not pay the fines.
Which I think is good, which I think is, you know, all of this is very good.
I think it could go further, but I like it.
I'm in favor of this.
Trump first used the law under his first term to levy hundreds of thousands of dollars against nine migrants, though the administration withdrew the penalties and instead imposed fines of around $60,000 per person.
Against at least four of the migrants, Joe Biden ceased issuing the fines when he took office.
Now, I would like to see the enforcement mechanism be that if you stay, you're going to be charged $1,000 per day, and then that outstanding balance We'll be paid off at the cost of around $4 an hour of hard labor as you work in the prison yard.
Maybe something like that.
That would be my little addendum to this, my little addition to this particular program.
But I think it is a good idea.
I think it's a good idea to seize their property.
After all, it is ours.
After all, what we're talking about here are property, hotel rooms, things like that.
Filled with money purchased with American taxpayer dollars, so this would be repossessing what they own.
But I also, here's where, and this is, I think it should be a non-controversial, extremely effective idea.
My brain has been running on this ever since the story about Norm Eisen and John Roberts, the Supreme Court judge.
Hanging out in Norm Eisen's 100-room palace in the Czech Republic.
I think we should seize that.
I think we should not just throw Norm Eisen in prison until his execution can be prepared for treason.
Lawful, legal.
I'm not calling for vigilantism here.
I'm calling for rescuing the country through...
Legitimate justice.
And then we can seize all of his stuff and pay off some of the money that he's stolen from the American taxpayers by the tens of millions.
I want prescriptions.
I guess what I'm saying now is I want prescriptions.
I want the full Marius treatment.
I want the full Sola treatment.
I want the full Roman Empire.
Roman Republic at its collapse.
Your wealth is a crime mentality for these people.
Not the Bernie Sanders kill the billionaires way, but in the we should get justice and all these people happen to also be billionaires.
Isn't that a convenient coincidence sort of thing?
Meanwhile... And finally, acting IRS commissioner resigning after agency reaches data-sharing deal with immigration authorities.
Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Melanie Krause informed her staff Tuesday she's leaving the agency amid internal chaos and the exodus of several senior IRS officials, according to two IRS employees and one former IRS employee.
Krause's decision to accept the agency's deferred resignation offer comes at the heels of the IRS and Department of Homeland Security finalizing an agreement on Monday to provide sensitive taxpayer data to federal immigration authorities to help the Trump administration.
Now, I've seen stories that present this with a headline that's like, IRS head leaves after refusing to hand over Americans' data.
Like, well, they're not Americans.
That is kind of the point here.
Illegal immigrants' data.
Also, I didn't hear a lot of outrage when...
Banks were sending lists of people who purchased Bibles to the Biden administration so they could be hunted down.
Look, at this point, I'm not embracing, but I am willing to accept some amount of authoritarianism from the government, but strictly under the understanding that we get some sort of benefit out of it.
Europe's already way down the line on this, but it's like, okay, we're in this modern world, we have these giant geopolitical enemies, we have massive coordinated campaigns of disruption in American politics, in American economy, in just generalized crime.
There are these issues that are bigger than anything that can be solved by an individual.
You need a government, and you need a powerful government to deal with this.
Otherwise, Pedophiles are going to run the internet.
Drug dealers are going to run your middle school.
You need a powerful government to deal with the level of threats and the technology that allows such things to exist.
How about it's used against the people who despise and are destroying us instead of us?
What if that was the case?
What if instead of using things like the Patriot Act to go after people that just want to be left alone Print guns as a hobby?
How about instead we go after the people in power who have systematically destroyed our country for decades?
What if we just did that instead?
That's my suggestion.
Novel though it may be.
And actually, I tweeted this out yesterday and it didn't do well on X, but weirdly enough I saw several pretty big Telegram channels.
Tweet it out and I'll just go ahead and I could just summarize it, but since I wrote it, I'll read it.
The craziest thing about Europe is that they have all these negatives that come with authoritarianism, but none of the positives.
Usually the deal goes something like this.
We're going to repress and censor and surveil you, but it's because we're cracking down on crime and degeneracy and foreigners.
The well-being of the citizens is supposed to be the thing that justifies the authoritarian behavior, but instead...
We're getting all of the crime and exploitation of anarchy with all the governmental domination of totalitarianism.
They can track down mothers for their Facebook posts but are impotent to stop systemic rape gangs.
It's the worst of both worlds.
And of course it's true here as well.
And it's the, I mean the classic phrase is anarcho-tyranny.
But I see another bit of an example of that here.
The IRS, I want to remind you, was weaponized under the Obama To specifically go after and target conservative groups, put them through the ringer, subject them to massive unrelenting and unfair scrutiny with the effort of,
if not outright destroying them, at least burdening them with these ridiculous legal torture methods.
And that's sort of a theme that I see throughout this, and I'm actually going to go to a video here.
I should probably drop it in the folder, but it's a little bit of a longer video, but I think it's worth it.
There's not really any way to pare it down.
At the end of the day, this guy making this video, I'm very happy that he's doing this, and he's just sort of what seems like a genuine on-the-ground grassroots activist just going and enforcing the law.
In Idaho, and you'll see what I mean in just a second.
And there's lots of ways that this manifests.
I like referring to it as the manager's prerogative, the manager's veto, something like that, where when it's convenient for the powers that be to impose the law,
then it's imposed without question, without mercy.
Without a human thought getting in the way.
They will crush you and they'll do it without even a momentary lapse into empathy, right?
It's just, well, it's just the way the system is.
You have to die and they flip the switch and kill you.
It's just business.
Business, strictly business to how the system was set up.
Until the system interferes with or comes into conflict with what they want.
Then all of a sudden, everything's a little wonky.
Everything's a little bit arbitrary.
Not everything is systemic as it once seems.
And I just keep seeing this time and time again.
I mean, practically every one of these stories aligns with this somehow.
Trump admin moves to find illegal immigrants.
$1,000 a day if they don't self-deport.
And the whole reason that they're here in the first place is because the Biden administration just sort of decided that they didn't want to follow the law.
They just sort of said, hey, you know what?
How about instead of protecting the border as we're constitutionally and legally obligated to do, we just make an app and then we can justify our unwillingness to actually fulfill our basic obligations.
Because they have an app.
So they pushed a button and now we don't have to follow the law.
It's just...
Just kind of arbitrary.
It's all very symbolic and magical, the way this works.
Federal-aid domain prisons after a state allows a man to be incarcerated with a woman.
Like, how did this happen?
How did this happen?
You have to wonder.
At what point did somebody just decide, you know that rule we have about women being with women and men being with men?
Let's just ignore that as long as the...
Man says he wants to be in the woman's prison.
I mean, I know we have these very strict rules that you cannot break, that you will be punished severely for even trying to break, but actually I don't want to enforce them, so now they don't exist.
And this just happens sort of over and over again.
And it's a little bit infuriating.
You know, the IRS commissioner, and, you know, the worst part about it is that all of these Organizations and groups are just filled with these partisan radicals.
And you'll see what I mean when we go to the video because I'm going to play the whole thing.
It's five minutes long.
And the video that we're going to go to is a guy in Idaho going to the statehouse and trying to get the trans flag taken down.
There's a big, ugly, anti-white flag flying over Idaho.
And that is the correct term for it, by the way.
It's the flag for people that can't create white babies.
Right? Gay people can't procreate.
It's the rainbow part.
Then you have black and brown and trans.
And so it's just a symbol for everybody.
Every single person in the world is represented by that flag, except for straight white people.
It is the anti-white procreation flag.
Regardless, it's illegal to fly...
Over Idaho, they passed a law.
It was an emergency motion.
Therefore, the flag must come down.
Except somehow, I don't know how, because, just for emphasis, it's Idaho.
We're talking about Idaho here, the most conservative place in the world.
But you'll see in the video, people just refusing to even acknowledge that the law exists.
Just lying outright, squirming like little demon children as they avoid just complying with the law.
So I just want to get across the spirit that we're up against, whatever it is, the legion that we're up against.
Our evil.
I guess that's all there is to say.
There's breaking news on the other side, I'm hearing.
Producers came to my ear and told me there's breaking news, so I'll learn it and then deliver it to you on the other side.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the American Journal.
I'm your host, Harrison Smith.
We have some breaking news here, and we're going to get into...
The tariffs that have gone into effect today.
Story from the New York Times.
Asian market falls as Trump's tariffs, including 104% on China, take effect.
Tariffs on products from 86 countries have now kicked in.
The White House signaled President Donald Trump was open to negotiating, including with China.
However, China seems to be one country not willing to negotiate.
Practically... Every other country I can think of, we reported it yesterday, 85 other countries basically came and said, hey, we're willing to work with you.
Because they've all had high tariffs and they're willing to work with Trump to get it back to zero.
China, however, wants to take it to the mat.
Wants to go toe-to-toe with America.
And it's just, frankly, not a good idea for them, even a little bit.
But that's what's causing all of the volatility and concern in the markets, and Trump's team is out taking to the airwaves and making some pretty incredible statements.
This is Treasury Secretary Scott Besant.
China is the worst offender in the international trade system.
He was on Fox News this morning.
Let's go to that video now.
unidentified
Give us your reaction to more escalation coming out of China, taking their tariffs up to 84% on top of President Trump's retaliatory tariffs.
Well, Maria, I think it's unfortunate that the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system.
They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them.
that they have some very smart, the economists, the academicians, technocrats within their bureaucracy, and they would be telling the leadership that we do not have the edge here.
They are the surplus country, that their exports to the U.S. are five times our exports
They're not backing down, and look, The globalists have deliberately intertwined the world's economies as a strategy for control.
Now, it's going to take a while to disentangle that.
Which, again, maybe the best imagery out there to explain this is the Gordian Knot.
They have just taken thread by thread, tied this impossible to even conceive convoluted mess of free trade where we don't produce anything ourselves, everything...
It has to come in from exports.
I mean, all of this was done deliberately and it's created a giant tangled mess that does not serve the people at all, even a little bit.
Donald Trump, with these tariffs, with this trade war, is slicing through the knot and solving the problem in one fell swoop.
And yeah, it's going to get a little messy, but that's not because Trump's the bad guy.
Trump is dealing with the bad situation that has been deliberately established over decades.
...by the globalists and the money masters and the international bankers who have wanted America to be hamstrung and incapable of action in the face of our intertwined economies and the leverage that China has by taking such a large chunk of our economy.
And we'll get back to how this happened, but the Trump team and those associated with it, the likes of Kevin O'Leary...
Are really not mincing words with China anymore.
Now, we just put 104% tariff on them.
They responded with like 84% tariffs, something equivalent.
Kevin O'Leary, associated with Trump, I don't know if he has any official positions, but he's certainly, you know, very tied into the Trump economic team.
He made a statement about how far the Trump administration is willing to go in defeating China.
I want Xi on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field.
This is not about tariffs anymore.
Nobody has taken on China yet, not the Europeans, no administration for decades.
As someone who actually does business there, I've had enough.
I speak for millions of Americans who have IP that have been stolen by the Chinese.
I have nothing.
Against the Chinese people.
They brought great literacy, art, and tech to the world.
The government cheats and steals.
And finally, an administration, you may not like Trump, you may not like his style or his rhetoric.
Finally, an administration that puts up and says, enough.
400% tariffs tomorrow morning.
He'll tell you why.
Xi can only stay the supreme leader if people are employed.
If we wipe out any business there, because we are still 39% of all consumables on Earth and 25% of the world's GDP, America is the number one economy on Earth with all the cards.
We will not have that forever.
It's time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall now.
unidentified
I'm not talking about tariffs on 60...
I hear you, but hold on.
If we're talking about people, the average consumer, not necessarily the head honchos of businesses all across the globe, can they withstand the pressure
It's short-lived.
But yeah, but what's your timeline?
You don't know the average American's timeline, what they can actually survive.
So again, they're just willing to play these pressure games with China.
That no American administration has been willing to do so far.
And I find it a little bit hypocritical or just, I guess you could just say annoying.
These are people who were willing to not just crash, but basically eradicate our entire economy for years over the flu.
Not a lot of concern about the average consumer in that situation.
But in this case, they're very concerned about it.
They're hyper-concerned.
Now, it's like crazy how well this is going for Trump.
It really is.
Because they really don't even have anything to argue against.
In this case, you saw her kind of tepidly trying to maybe like, well, but what about the regular people that are going to be suffering?
It's like, well, not really.
I mean, maybe for a little bit, but...
You can buy things that are made in America.
This just makes sense.
This is all being done for the sake of the American middle class, American manufacturing, American real prosperity, not the fake numbers go up, stock market charts that reflect absolutely nothing about the real world.
I mean, here's a funny thing.
How much has Doge sliced out of the American economy so far?
How is it that you can cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of an economy and stocks don't even vaguely respond to it?
I mean, what does the stock market actually represent?
And what you realize is like, it represents a very small slice of the actual economic life of America as a whole.
And when you think about something like the NGO system, this is a government sponsored industry worth probably in total trillions of dollars that is just totally quarantined from the stock market.
It has nothing to do with the stock market.
But obviously it has a massive tangible effect on your quality of life.
As your tax dollars go up and then are siphoned off and taken away and given away by the hundreds of billions to leftist organizations, they can spread it all over the world.
None of that affects the stock market.
The stock market doesn't even acknowledge any of that happening because the companies aren't publicly traded.
They're not being run for profit, ostensibly.
And so it's like, okay, we have this economy that's got all of these portions.
Some of it...
Concern the stock market or the stocks are reflected in that.
But you also have gigantic trillion dollar organizations, collections of organizations, whatever you'd want to call it, like markets in and of themselves, that just have nothing to do with the stock market whatsoever,
except in that they're taking your tax money to give to other consumers that they can spend it in the market.
thinking about that last night, about how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been cut off from Doge and how it's never even discussion.
Like it's obvious because it doesn't have anything to do with the stock market.
But nobody came out and said, this is going to crash the stock market if you cut this off because –
The stock market is good for measuring the stock market, but it actually is completely...
Or largely unrelated to your quality of life, general prosperity, whether the middle class exists or not.
All of these things are negatively affected by so much of what the government does.
It is completely unrelated and totally disconnected from the rest of the economic market.
And I guess the point I'm making about all of this is that it's all fake and a giant illusion.
But the reason I'm saying that this is going so well for Trump is this is one of the ways that leftist magazines and news is framing this.
From Forbes magazine, which is almost never friendly to Trump.
We've covered lots of Forbes articles that are
insane. So I would consider them mainstream, therefore leftists.
Trump's biggest billionaire donors lost thanks to tariffs.
Tariffs wiped out trillions of dollars in value Thursday.
Much of it held by the world's richest people.
Is the left getting this message?
Are they understanding?
Will it ever percolate up through the morass of disinformation and brainwashing the gunk that is blocking up their mental systems?
Will it ever be cleared out and will they ever be able to understand?
How useful they have been as idiots for the ruling
And again, you can debate whether it's hypocrisy, deception, or ignorance, but at the end of the day, the left will constantly crow about billionaires.
They don't think billionaires should exist.
They want to kill all the billionaires.
The fact that billionaires exist is evidence that our entire system is evil.
It's a condemnation of capitalism itself.
And then simultaneously, every policy they support is just like free ice cream for billionaires.
It's just consolidate everything in the hands of billionaires, empower the billionaires, just do everything you possibly can to give as much as you possibly can to the billionaires.
It's very strange how this happens.
Now we on the right, On the dissident populist right, don't have animus or hatred or, you know, jealousy of billionaires because they're billionaires.
But on the other hand, we can recognize a system not fit for purpose, not doing what it's supposed to be doing, not serving the vast majority of normal, average, everyday people, and instead serving entirely The elite of the elite,
the 1% of the 1%.
I remember getting in this argument back when Bernie Sanders first, it wasn't even Bernie Sanders, it was Occupy Wall Street, when Occupy Wall Street was first happening, and arguing with my aunt, who's very diehard, hardcore conservative.
Republican, but, you know, the way Occupy had been presented, it was like, ah, these stupid, hippie liberals.
And, you know, this is all propaganda, 99% versus 1%.
However, the identity politics was created to, you know, cause dissension and destroy this movement.
We can get into that history.
But I remember having this conversation and talking about the 99% and 1% and being like, it's not propaganda.
It's just real.
It's just numbers.
It's just like that is the economic status quo.
I mean, you can use it, I guess, as propaganda to make stupid socialist arguments, but the fact is that a very, very, very, very, very small number of people have a very, very, very outsized influence and control on the American economy.
And what that leads to is frustration, anger, unfairness, inequality, legitimate inequality where...
People are not being paid what they're worth because the people in power can get away with it, because they can bribe the politicians, because they can run PR campaigns and have the media on their side, sowing division in their enemies and distracting the average person or getting them to disregard these arguments on the basis of partisan politics.
The fact is that America has a very, very, very big problem with inequality and everything the left does exacerbates it.
I mean, if you think about all of the things that they, and you know, COVID is just the best example, right?
Because not only can you compare it to, you know, the economic destruction that was wrought under lockdown to what's happening now and the disparate reactions of the left, where under COVID, it was, if you were like, hey, won't this crash the economy?
They were just like, shut up, bigot.
You shouldn't get healthcare anymore.
I mean, they just.
It didn't matter.
They were in panic mode.
They couldn't possibly consider economic ramifications at a time like this.
Fast forward, now we're trying to implement tariffs, and they're just like, if this causes prices to raise three cents on the dollar, then Trump is Hitler.
And it's just, it's inconsistent.
It's hypocritical.
It's nonsensical.
But what was the outcome of the lockdowns during COVID?
It was to consolidate trillions of dollars of industry into the hands of the billionaires, the media.
Or the industrial magnates into the Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates's of the world.
A wholesale transfer.
Something like $4 trillion out of the middle class to the billionaire class.
That was the leftist program.
Now the right wing program of tariffs is destroying that billionaire class.
Or at least massively impacting that billionaire class.
Much more so than the middle class.
And even the left wing media is having to admit this.
And they're twisting themselves in knots.
Trying to portray it as a bad thing for the average reader.
But it's obviously not.
I guess they're trying to make the Trump administration seem stupid, I guess.
So they're like, oh, they have all these billionaires.
It's not worse.
So first they try to associate the Trump administration with having a bunch of billionaire donors, even though the left has way more billionaire donors.
We have one, right?
We have Elon.
He's pretty cool.
And so they try to say, oh, Trump's the president for billionaires.
But then his actual actions and the tariffs that he places actually really negatively impact the billionaires.
So instead of recognizing that and going, oh, he's not doing this for billionaires.
He's not trying to exploit the middle class or lower classes to benefit the billionaires.
That's just not tangible results of what's happening.
Instead of recognizing and acknowledging that.
They're like, oh, not now.
So not only what this means now, their interpretation is what this means now is not only is he the president of billionaires, he's just too stupid to even do it right.
So now he's an oligarch and he's just incompetent.
It's like, no, the premise was wrong.
Your premise was faulty.
He was never an oligarch.
He was never doing this on behalf of the billionaires.
And it's like, do we even need to say this?
The elite despise Donald Trump.
What do you not get about this?
What do you not understand about the fact that the real power brokers, the real billionaires, the real intergenerational wealth-holding families of world controllers, they don't flaunt their wealth,
they don't fly around with planes with their names on the side, they don't do things like Trump does, and that's why they hate him, because they have a...
Secretive mindset.
They have a mindset of power from the shadows, of hiding your wealth, disguising your influence and power as a way to maximize your influence and power.
Right? The average billionaire, they don't want their name to be known across America because the more public attention they have on them, the less they'll be able to manipulate and deceive and pull the strings from the shadows.
It's completely at odds with the traditional conception of power in the European construct, in the European political system.
Coming out of nobility and the aristocracy and having the noblesse oblige where the people in power had to be right out front and center.
They had to be the ones delivering the speeches.
They had to be the ones standing up and explaining the decisions that they were making.
Because it was their heads that it was going to come down on if things didn't work correctly.
So you had the benefits and the privileges of being an elite, the benefits and privileges of being ultra wealthy, connected, influential.
But there was a tradeoff that your life was public.
You were under scrutiny and you had to serve the people or else you would pay the price for it.
What's happened over the last hundred
at least, a little bit more if you want to take it back to like the French Revolution, is that the elite of the world realized they could have all the power of the nobles but none of the responsibility, none of the obligations, none of the attention on them if they manipulated things from
the shadows.
So that's how they've constructed the world.
Donald Trump is a betrayal of that in their eyes.
And he's exposing the grisly inner parts of the machine that they're operating.
I don't know.
It's been 10 years.
Donald Trump's been in the public political process.
that they live their lives, they spend their money, and they express their influence in ways that are secretive, clandestine, shadowy, and deceitful.
Those are the people that Donald Trump is going after.
Those are the people that he is at war with.
And those are the people that are dictating to the media how to cover it and how to try to trick the average person into playing defense for them.
So my message to the audience would be, like to the people who aren't on our side already, who are just desperately searching for something to hate Trump for, Don't be useful idiots for the billionaires that you hate so much.
I don't even hate the billionaires.
You do.
So why are you the one that constantly falls for their lies?
Why are you the ones that constantly contribute or support the policies that consolidate power and influence and money into their hands?
Why do you keep falling for their obvious tricks?
And what can I do to get across to you?
That the champion of the average person, the little guy, the small businessman, is Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, the populist movement.
It's not the fabricated grass, you know, astroturfed grassroots bullshit peddlers, the mainstream media, manipulated like puppets by the very billionaires you think you're opposing.
I don't know what to do to get this across, but the tariffs are just another, and in this case, fantastic example of the fact, Thank you for watching!
We're going to be joined in studio by our guest in the third hour, Jessica Solce.
Solce? Solce?
Jessica Solce?
Very excited to talk to her about some of the documentaries she's made, including about El Salvador.
We'll get into their golden age that America is attempting to tepidly imitate.
Very excited to talk to her, but I'm going to have to take your calls at this hour because this is a call-in show.
There's just so much news.
I haven't been able to get to calls as much recently as I wanted to.
So I'll do that in just a second.
But I want to play this video from Jesse Waters, but it begins with a Ross Perot clip, and it just goes to what I was saying yesterday, and what I say practically every day on this show at some point is point out the importance of InfoWars being here,
the importance of people speaking out, in that it doesn't let them pretend that they didn't know.
When we were calling out COVID being a lab leak in January of 2020, it's...
It makes it kind of ridiculous that even now the experts are saying, well, it looks like it might have been a lab leak, actually, but nobody knew.
It's like, well, we knew.
Somehow we knew.
And somehow, in the early 90s, Ross Perot knew that NAFTA was going to suck jobs out of America like a giant vacuum.
Now, today, you'll hear, and if you listen to any mainstream reporting, they act like this was totally unexpected.
In fact, they're still denying it's happening anyway.
I told you about the NPR segment I was listening to where they were saying, NAFTA didn't get rid of our jobs.
It was technological advances that closed the factories.
Like, that's stupid, sir.
That doesn't even make sense in a little, like, even a little bit.
So, Ross Perot nailed reality.
Hit the nail on the head.
And told everybody exactly what was going to happen.
So now that it's all come to fruition 30 years later, they can't look back and say nobody knew.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple.
If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers, And you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, have no health care, that's the most expensive single element, making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement,
and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
unidentified
They called Ross Perot crazy, but after 30 years, they call him right.
Bubba was wrong.
He signed NAFTA and the giant sucking sound came from the south.
But how can we stand by as millions of American workers lose their jobs, as thousands of American companies can't compete fairly?
unidentified
No one seeks political advantage.
What we seek, rather, is fairness.
Fairness in trade.
The party that represented workers, the Democrats, immediately recognized the giant sucking sound was bad for workers, but good for donors.
Wall Street got rich off the giant sucking sound, and so did Pelosi, Hillary, Kerry, Gore, all of them.
So they talked about it to win votes, but didn't do anything about it, and turned China into a monster.
Their monster.
I worked at a factory.
Went to factory in 1989.
We made radio passenger tires for cars.
I worked there with my dad, eight of my uncles, and 12 of my cousins.
I was a union steward there.
That plant now sits in China because you can import small radio passenger tires pretty cheap because of our failed trade policy and this Democrat's opinion.
Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee.
I could go on and on.
They traded jobs in honor for cheap phones and TV screens.
Trump's declaring an end to the giant sucking sound and decided to slay the monster.
And even though it's a three hour show, it sounds like a lot of times five minutes is a lot to dedicate.
But we'll at least go to it for a couple reasons.
One, because I want to see more activism like this, if you can even call it activism.
But it just shows that...
You know, it takes sometimes an average person just going and making a fuss to get stuff done, even if it's legally and, you know, bureaucratically supposed to happen.
It takes one of you to go out and knock on a door or two and insist that it be done.
In this case, it's the taking down of the pride flag, the non-white, the anti-white procreation flag.
Which is, I think, the best way to envision whatever this flag is.
It's not the rainbow flag, which is actually aesthetically pleasing, if not symbolically the most delightful thing.
But then you've got this chevron in the flag with black and trans.
And by the way, do you know that that was a prank?
Maybe I'm the only one that remembers this, but this flag is a 4chan prank.
There was the rainbow flag, and I think the first thing they added was like a transgender chevron, the triangle shape at the edge.
Because they were like, oh, it's not just about, even though you'd think T is included in LGBT, that the rainbow flag would represent transgender, but like there's something narcissistically compelling them to want their own colors added.
And of course, they're baby blue and baby pink because it's...
All very perverted and weird and they have to take the baby colors to emphasize that.
But I'm pretty sure it was a 4chan prank to then go in and add black and brown to this flag.
And then they picked it up and ran.
I don't think they realized it was a joke.
And so now it's like the official flag of the enemy.
But I'm pretty sure it started as a 4chan prank.
Yeah, there's the queer Chevron flag.
Not Chevron the company.
Chevron is the term for that shape on a flag.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they added the trans stuff and then 4chan was like, oh, if we're adding things, let's add black and brown too.
Trying to ruin the flag, but like these people are so aesthetically poisonous they didn't even understand it was a joke.
Anyway, that's all beside the point.
The point is I want to show this video because this guy Actually goes and makes a difference in his locale, in his local administration building.
But you'll also see not only in all places, of all places, Boise, Idaho has pretty diehard activists working for them.
And again, in line with everything else that we talk about, and it really does seem to be a through line through every story we talk about, is the arbitrary nature of the application of laws where Whether it's international law and the importance of the rules-based international order that just gets completely thrown out or tossed on its head when it contradicts Israel or what they want to do in Ukraine or the laws about immigration being just completely ignored if an administration chooses
to do so.
Laws are extremely rigorous and strict and must be adhered to.
Unless they just don't feel like it, in which case, whatever.
And that comes across very strongly in this video.
Let's go to the video now.
It is Mitch, Mitch at Boise City, the Boise City Hall in Idaho, demanding that they adhere to the law that they just passed.
We're here at the Boise City Hall to see if we can get this trans and pride flag over here taken down by letting them know about House Bill 96, which just passed, I believe it was Thursday, under an emergency, which therefore goes into effect immediately.
And so I was here two months ago.
I was locked in the mayor's office.
Let's go in and see what happens this time when you go in the mayor's office and let them know about House Bill 96. House Bill 96, also known as Idaho Code 67-2303A, provides that a governmental entity shall only display certain flags.
A governmental entity shall not display a flag on its property other than the following.
The United States flag, official flags of any of the military branches, official flags of any state in the United States, and official flags of the Indian tribes.
We'll let it continue here in just a second, but most people, a lot of people, this would be the end of the video.
This would be the end of the video, right?
They've gotten the acknowledgement from the person.
Yeah, no, we'll take care of that.
Don't worry about it.
We'll get on that as soon as possible.
Okay, well, can I talk to the facilities people?
No, they're busy, actually.
Really? You didn't ask.
You didn't check.
You could at least pretend to check.
Right? It's just the classic, like, oh, yeah, facilities, let me check.
Hey, facilities, are you?
Nope. Ah, sorry, they're unavailable.
My bad.
Just nothing I can do.
It's like, you're lying.
The next part of the video, the guy goes and finds the facilities guy.
He's not busy.
He's not unavailable.
He's right there.
He's right there.
So it's just a little reminder, a little persistence.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Don't be put off by these bureaucratic cogs trying to placate you by not actually doing anything.
Okay, again, it's the law.
If this was any other law, they'd be getting on it right now.
But in this case, they don't really like the law.
They don't think they're going to enforce the law.
I mean, they're already breaking the law by raising the flag in the first place, which they have to do every morning.
So it's not like this is just a holdover from a time when the flag was hung up a couple weeks ago.
No, they raised it this morning in abject violation of the law.
And now you're telling them to turn down.
It's like, well, but we don't really want to.
And we don't think we are going to.
And sure, we'll take care of that.
It'll just be a little while.
Complicated process.
We have to file the flag taking down paperwork first.
And you can't just go down and take the flag without signing the insurance form.
Now, in any normal...
And when they go, um, yeah, maybe eventually we'll get to that.
I mean, that should take place in July, even though it's emergency.
Just don't worry about it.
What should happen next is the guy should go, okay.
Sorry, let me rephrase that.
I'm going to take the flag down now.
I thought you should be aware that I'm doing this in compliance with the law.
And as an act of, I guess you could say, vigilante justice, I am now Compelling the government to adhere to its own laws.
So I'm going to go take the pride flag down now.
Unless you want to do it first.
But I'm going to go do it.
And I'm going to light it on fire.
So if you want to take it down and store it somewhere, you should do that.
Because when I take it down, I'm taking it home and burning it to post on X. Okay, so I'm going to go do that.
And then you should go do that.
That's the way it should work.
Instead he goes to the...
We don't have to go to the rest of the video, but I love that video.
If we can bring up the guy's name, Casey, sorry.
Just bring up the video and his Casey Whalen.
Casey underscore Whalen on X. Very good stuff.
He eventually, he's like, the guy just keeps stonewalling him, and so the guy filming just goes down to the facilities, and the guy down there, he talks to him and is like, hey, you need to take that flag down.
And the guy's like, oh, okay.
Just goes and does it.
So it's, yeah, that's what it takes.
That's what it takes.
So good to see Idaho.
Not allowing our government buildings to be festooned with that satanic anti-Christ, anti-white symbol, and for the citizen operatives going out there and compelling them to enforce that law, even against the homosexual objections of the employees there.
We've talked about this, just the size of Iran's ballistic missile program, the fact they have literal cities under Iran just full of hundreds of thousands of missiles.
They have these hypersonic missiles that can get right through the Iron Dome like it's nothing.
So yeah, and I've talked about this for a while as well, that it was always sort of assumed that the nuclear card was the card that was being played, that's what was going to be negotiated over, and then America comes back and makes this absolutely Outrageous demand that Iran would never submit to.
unidentified
Pretty much.
And so some people are saying, is Donald Trump doing his classic strategy, the art of the deal, where he initially proposes an impossibly high demand, so then when they settle back down to a more reasonable demand,
they're like, okay, good, good, that's more reasonable.
And that could be the case.
Or there's an alternative theory that there are bad actors in...
Donald Trump's administration who are sabotaging the peace efforts because Donald Trump has repeatedly said, I really don't want to have to bomb Iran.
And I really want peace.
It's going to be bad for Iran if I have to bomb them.
So please, you know, let's make peace.
And I believe Donald Trump is sincere in that.
He appears sincere in that.
But then the proposal makes no sense.
And so that's where we start to wonder, is Donald Trump's foreign policy being sabotaged by By bad actors in the situation, because as we all know, it's been Israel's thing since forever to lobby a war.
We have to remember Wesley Clark's leaking after 9-11, where he went to, I guess it was the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, and they were talking about seven countries in five years.
Well, every single one of those countries has basically been hit, except for Iran.
And so we know that this is a deep state plan since forever.
Right now, there's a huge amassing of forces off of Yemen, and many people are speculating, United States forces, and people are speculating, well, Saudi Arabia is for sure gearing up for some kind of round two with Yemen.
Round one for Saudi Arabia went very badly, but the Saudi Arabia lobby has been telling the Donald Trump administration that the reason why it went badly was because their hands were tied by Obama.
Now, that's not true.
It went badly because they literally can't win.
And I'm shocked that they're going to go in for another round of getting licks because they just did terribly against Yemen.
And they just caused massive starvation and blockade.
But the war went super poorly.
But somehow they convinced themselves they're doubling down.
The Saudis are doubling down and saying, well, if only we had more U.S. support, we totally could have beaten the Yemenis.
That's totally delusional.
It's a shocking thing to believe.
Their ego is so big they can't accept that they actually just lost the war because they can't fight as well as their opponent.
They're just hearing about Yemen for the first time.
But no, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have been at war for, what is it, 15 years at this point?
I mean, it has been a long knockdown slugfest.
Between those two, those two countries, this is not anything new.
And America has been backing Saudi Arabia in that conflict for a very long time.
And yeah, I agree.
And my worry is that Trump does this like carried in the stick thing where, you know, he's sending aircraft carriers and military naval vessels to sort of menace Iran.
And sure, he might not be actually intending to use them.
and this is just the negotiation tactic, building pressure against your enemy.
But at the same time, he is sending ships there.
They are now in a dangerous situation, and it could easily get out of his control.
So even if his intentions are to avoid war by peace through strength, it might get out of his hand.
I mean, he's being set up for a second Pearl Harbor off the Iranian coast.
So even if his intention is to just use it as a negotiation tactic,
unidentified
Right. If an aircraft carrier is sunk and the bad actors film it in high-definition detail, you know, in 4K, and put it all over the Internet, what can he do?
He can't block that.
He can't control that narrative at that point.
He'll be forced to respond whether it was a fake, you know, whether it was a false flag or not.
And so as of now, the United States has managed to kind of limit the PR damage of the naval vessels being hit because the U.S. Navy has been constantly getting hit by missiles, but we don't see the videos.
We barely get any reports.
We don't hear about any sailors getting injured.
We don't know.
It's like immediate blackout, basically.
So that has been happening, and that's one of the craziest things about this conflict is that United States aircraft carriers have come under attack multiple times, which probably should be headlines.
You know, everywhere.
This should be like one of those things like breaking news.
United States aircraft carrier is coming under attack, but they don't want that because they don't want this situation to spiral out of control.
So it's, you know, saving face, that kind of thing.
But nonetheless, the fact that we're in a situation where the United States Navy is coming under direct attack and no one even talks about it and it's not really getting reported and no one really cares.
This is unacceptable from an American patriotic point of view because the American sailor.
...is now being given less care, less empathy, less respect than a Palestinian civilian or even a Yemeni civilian.
So if a guy dies in Palestine, we hear about that, but we don't hear about if a U.S. sailor burns to death from a missile.
We don't hear about that.
That's totally unacceptable.
So they're putting the U.S. soldiers at a low level of respect.
As human beings, but also just from a patriotic standpoint, this is crazy.
They're using the United States soldiers in a very disrespectful way.
It used to be different.
We used to hear about the United States soldiers if they got hurt anywhere.
Now the situation in the Middle East has flipped.
When United States soldiers got hit in Iraq, we barely hear about it.
When they die in Syria, we barely hear about it.
This is a dangerous situation where now they've set it up.
Where we're basically desensitized or we're used to the fact that we will get hit and that it will be serving basically Israel foreign policy and our soldiers are getting hurt and we don't even hear about it.
Ironically, we hear more about Americans being killed in Gaza who are actively soldiers for the IDF at the time and just happen to have a...
American Passport.
We don't have long.
We have about a minute left in this segment.
But here's a story from Postmillennial.
Trump holding nuclear talks with Iran on Saturday.
President Trump has said the U.S. will be dealing directly with Iran at a high-level meeting regarding nuclear deal this coming Saturday.
The meeting will be the first time that the U.S. will be meeting with Iran directly since Trump met with the company in 2018 when the U.S. pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, GCPOA.
Netanyahu was at the White House earlier this week.
He left.
Not seeming super pleased.
I mean, what do you think happens in the next week?
We got 30 seconds left, John.
unidentified
Basically, this is Donald Trump's chance to avert a massive war.
So it's the peacekeeper trying to make peace.
If he can make a deal which both sides want, then I think we're good.
If it's sabotaged by people like, remember Bolton sabotaged North Korea?
It's something like that.
So it's up to Donald Trump to control the situation now.
We should all be praying for Donald Trump.
You know, the Bible says, blessed are the peacemakers.
Yeah, and look, we're trying to do these tariff things.
We're trying to clear out our country of the illegal immigrants that have flooded over the tens of millions.
The last thing we need is another war in the Middle East that would quickly spiral into a third world war.
It's the last thing that we need.
It should be the last thing on our list.
And Godspeed, Donald Trump, and bring about peace in the region.
back. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the American Journal.
I'm going to go directly out to your calls.
We've got a few more stories to cover before welcoming my guest, Jessica Solz, in studio to talk about her incredible documentary, Showing the Path Forward, using the example of El Salvador to explain how that country regained its greatness.
I'm very excited to talk to her.
I've hardly plugged it all today.
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In fact, let me just stop right there since you're on it, and I was going to present this image today.
Anyway, it's Chinese-owned farmland in America.
Yeah, and so it just shows the counties where this farmland is located.
But you can tell, I mean, it is across the entire country.
And it happens to be especially located over here in California and Nevada, where there is a ton of Air Force activity and military installations, as well as a cluster right there on the eastern seaboard just around and south of Washington,
D.C., where, again, a lot of our military infrastructure is located.
And this image was posted with the...
Very simple and highly agreeable statement.
Seize Chinese farmland.
Seize it.
Grab it.
Snap it up.
I think that is a weapon in our tool belt that we have, or a tool in our tool belt that we have not deployed yet.
Continue. Now the third one, and this is speculation, but if I was them, I mean, it seems obvious to me.
We get 90 percent of our pharmaceuticals from China and everybody's wagging out about, well, if if they just cut that off, then our psychotic people will be off their meds and go psychotic.
That's not the danger.
The danger is they also produce all the fentanyl.
Now, if they if they do a pause or something like a two week pause, they're like, oh, delay of shipment.
And then everybody kind of gets to the point of running out and then they ship all their drugs.
Every single bit of it is has a lethal dose of fentanyl.
We could lose 10 million people in a couple of days without anybody knowing what's going on.
Right. That to me, if I was China and I was going to drop a war before I fired.
...has a vulnerability to attack America are infinite.
Because you're exactly right.
They supply 90% of our pharmaceuticals.
That alone is like a suicidal position for America to be in.
Why we've given them the manufacturing to all of that is just absurd and insane.
And you're right.
If they'd wanted, they could do some fentanyl thing like that.
But let's not forget that all of our electronics are made in China.
And that they do put backdoor...
You know, hardware-level access to things like our energy transformers.
They could, I mean, and they've got the sabotage teams behind enemy lines, you know, having been brought into America and then disappeared somewhere in our interior.
We've, you know, talked about the hacking that they've gotten into, including people on American soil hacking on behalf of China.
know there's all the i'll say military-aged men but standing at attention like soldiers because they are because that's who they are sent by china and welcomed in by you know the the border patrol uniformed trojan horse uh that we're
welcoming in like the idiots that we are so yeah i mean it would
China and Russia have been running bombing sorties, fake bombing sorties, with Russian and Chinese planes over Alaskan water.
For the last several months, like, clearly China is getting a little bit confident when it comes to America.
But what do you think about the sentiment from the Art of War, when you're weak, appear strong, when you're strong, appear weak?
I mean, do you think this is the weakness of China being disguised by them being more aggressive and bombastic when it comes to the economic situation?
Trump's doing the art of war and China's doing the art of war and Trump's doing the art of the deal.
But then when it comes to the Belt and Road Initiative, it actually gets flipped where China is doing diplomacy by generosity where they're offering to build infrastructure for these third world countries in exchange for more influence and control and access to their markets.
Whereas America has always used force.
Internationally to try to get our way.
So, yeah, it's very interesting, this global conflict we're in with China and the various forms in which it manifests.
Thank you so much for the call, Joshua.
Just since we're on the topic, I've got a few posts here about the conflict with China from Zero Hedge.
Zero Hedge says China has three options.
One, concede defeat to whatever terms Trump demands.
Now, I don't think they're going to do that strictly off of the saving face nature of...
Chinese politics, humiliation is the worst possible outcome, so they're not going to do that, in my opinion.
They could devalue the Chinese yuan by 20-40%, or they could unleash the biggest financial fiscal stimulus in history.
We're talking $2-3 trillion, which will push its debt off the chart, and that is an untenable position following what they had to do during COVID, as they were hit just as bad as anybody else, even though it was all orchestrated.
Fabricated in the first place.
Meanwhile, Chamath Indian name from the All In podcast says, as many problems as the U.S. may have, I would say China's are worse.
One, China is seeing the slowest growth they've had in decades.
Two, their attractiveness as a recipient of foreign domestic investment has come to a halt.
Three, they have very difficult demographic problems of too many old people and not enough young people.
Four, they need exports.
They do not have the capacity to absorb everything they create.
Come midnight, we'll see who blinks first.
So this really is a game of international fiscal chicken we're playing here with the specter of nuclear warheads looming in the background as this monetary conflict could easily spiral out into a military one.
It is one of the coolest stories you'll ever read.
So there's a little bit before this gospel actually takes effect, but it's actually about Mary, and it says that she received her hand from the food of angels, or her food from the hand of angels and all this stuff.
But then it goes into the gospel of the infancy, and he predicts his own death at the age of three months.
They come across these robbers, and he says, yeah, Mom, I'm going to be crucified in between these two guys here in 30 years.
And his dirty diapers are like causing exorcisms and the demons they chase out to burst into flames, and just all this crazy pilot tells Jesus he's a Jew.
Yeah, so, you know, I was sort of expecting, honestly, you see stuff like this and...
You know, a lot of times it's like, well, it was first revealed in the 1200s.
But that doesn't seem to be the case with this.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel about the childhood of Jesus.
The scholarly consensus dates it back to the mid to late 2nd century, with the oldest extant fragment manuscript dating back to the 4th or 5th century, and the first complete manuscript being in the Codex Sabbaticus from the 11th century.
But essentially, the first quotation of this was from Arrhenius of Leon around 180 AD.
I was listening earlier and you guys were talking about the pride flag and how 4chan put brown and black colors on there as a joke.
I actually have heard that before, but never really confirmed it or honestly really cared.
But one of my good friends is a pretty reputable, well-known libertarian here in the Valley.
And, you know, when you're in a political party that's not very big and, you know, you assume a role in it and, you know, you have to interact with members of the other parties, especially when, like, elections and,
like, I don't know if you're familiar with the 2020 elections, but shit went down in Arizona.
Yeah. But the Libertarian Party had representation during the counting, and they just wanted to make sure that the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed.
And my friend took a picture with a member with Dr. Kelly Ward, and he's also a pretty well-known figure in the gay community, and they just...
...went to town on him and are ripping him because he took a picture with a Republican.
It's like, dude, you guys are so uncivilized.
It's not the Libertarians or the Republicans or even really the Green Party people.
I've got a buddy that I work with, and he's 100% on board with the Green Party, and he understands how corrupt the Dems are.
But they just don't want to work with anybody.
They eat their own, and they have no sense of community, yet they're all about the community.
It's not that they're about the community.
They want to destroy our communities by allowing third-world invaders to come in and assume property, and our tax liability, our tax is going to fund their lives and their children,
all the shit.
And it's like, man, We don't, you know, I don't know.
And at a certain point, we just have to understand like these people are utterly inconsistent in everything that they believe.
I mean, you just throw anything at the wall, it all sticks, right?
Every position they hold is contradictory and nonsensical and backwards and moronic.
I mean, it's the people that are...
The die-hard feminists that are somehow in support of Islam, I mean, that alone tells you everything you need to know about where these people's minds are at.
There is no solid principle they're standing on.
Everything is subjective.
Everything, you know, their answer changes depending on who it is or when it happened.
At a certain point, we need to stop trying to convince these people and just do what's right and what's necessary and what's good regardless of their objections.
So, yeah, I...
I feel for your friend.
So you're saying your friend is a big libertarian person, a gay person who's being attacked by the left and the homosexuals in his own party for daring to, like, rub elbows with Republicans.
unidentified
Yeah, and it's not even that he was rubbing elbows.
I mean, he was there doing libertarian party duty by, you know, counting, you know, making sure, like, hey, look, you know, he's an honest person.
And it's sad to watch and, you know, to watch him, like, go through that.
But, you know, they eat their own.
And it takes one person like that at a time to realize, like, look, these people are uncivilized.
And, you know, I know, I actually know when all of the left started to lose their minds and completely lose their principles.
Because they weren't that bad until, I mean, they were always bad.
But they went off the rails when Obama signed into act the, what was it, the Munt?
A lot of people point out to the Smith-Munt Act as being sort of a catalyst of that.
I thought you were going to say Occupy Wall Street because we were talking about that earlier.
And people have shown that all of these terms, whether it's racism or white supremacy or all these divisive terms, you can track it.
And they're all very low usage.
They don't get brought up a lot.
And Occupy Wall Street happens, and suddenly that spikes.
And we've talked about it before.
We don't need to go over it now.
But you can find, like, you know, recounting of this from people at Occupy who were like, we were all unified.
We were all, you know, together.
It didn't matter white, black, poor, rich.
Like, we just wanted to go after Wall Street and get them to change.
And then all of a sudden, people started showing up and going, oh, you know, maybe it's best we have the black people speak first.
And let's have the women speak first.
And white men, you, you know, wait till later.
And suddenly there was division.
Suddenly there was controversy.
Suddenly there was...
You know, friction between these people that were formerly united.
So I think it very, very clearly, the powers that be, the banking elite realized, wow, the American people are ganging up against us.
We need to divide and conquer.
We need to split these groups up and have them warring with each other.
And so they sort of invented identity politics or at least massively pushed identity politics and very effectively broke up the unified resistance to the, you know, 1% takeover.
And Smith-Munt obviously contributed to that.
But just on that note, I have this story from the Postmillennial.
55% of left-leaning Americans say it's, quote, somewhat justified to kill Donald Trump.
Calls to assassinate and positive attitudes about killing public figures such as President Donald Trump and others have become more normalized in the United States, according to a shocking new report, with the rise of, quote, assassination culture happening particularly on the left.
According to a poll done by National Contagion Network Contagion Research Institute, a growing number of people are fine, justifying, or will even celebrate political assassination, and the change appears to have taken place recently.
The report states, quote, political violence targeting Donald Trump and Elon Musk is becoming increasingly normalized.
Following July 13th, 2024, attempted assassination of President Trump.
And we, of course, see this in the celebration of the likes of Luigi Mangione, who currently has a bill in California named after him.
It's the Luigi Mangione bill about health insurance, trying to make positive change, naming it after a merciless, senseless, cold-blooded killer, a man who murdered a father of two.
...is now being celebrated and having bills named after him.
Now, if you'd call it the Brian Thomas memorial bill named after the victim, maybe, you know, you'd have a leg to stand on.
These people are celebrating and deifying literal bottom-of-the-barrel murderers, just assassins.
It's outrageous, but it's not unpredictable.
It's not unpredictable, and this is one of those things that we need to get across to Americans.
The fact that America doesn't have assassinations is extremely, vanishingly rare in the course of human history, or in the modern world.
In Mexico, every election season sees hundreds of candidates assassinated.
This is just what happens in the third world.
This is very normal for large, large swaths of the planet.
Americans have this weird assumption that everybody's like us.
Nobody's like us.
Whether it's political violence or corruption and bribery, that's normalized
else. Not as much Europe.
They're a little bit better.
China is better than us on some of these things, but worse than us on others.
But they don't have the sensibilities that we have.
As Westerners, as Christians, as Americans, as Europeans, we have this,
That's what I'm trying to get across here.
It's normal in Mexico for candidates to be murdered and people accept it and recognize it's just part of doing business.
Hey, you want to run for office?
The cartel is going to kill you.
That's just how it works.
They just accept it.
Now, as we become more like the third world, as we become more of the third world, as our populations of the third world change our demographics, It changes our level of tolerance for those types of things.
And of course it's the extremism on the left and the dehumanization of people on the right.
60 politicians were assassinated during the pre-campaign and campaign periods in Mexico in 2024.
60 politicians assassinated in a single year in Mexico.
So don't think that like there's going to be some point where it's like, oh, we're not going to stand for this anymore.
We could very easily, very easily go down the road of third worldization, right?
Where America becomes just like these other countries, where if you get pulled over, you're going to have to pay the cop a bribe.
And if you want a good judgment, you're going to have to know the judge and be friends with him and give him a little something under the table.
And when your politician is going up against entrenched criminal networks, he's going to be shot in the head and the investigation is going to go nowhere.
We cannot go down that road and we can insist on our American principles or we can just succumb to the left in their third worldization of our country.
Ladies and gentlemen, third hour of American Journal is on.
I'm your host, Harrison Smith, joined in studio by Jessica Solche.
She's an independent filmmaker who's known for her documentaries No Control and Death Athletic.
A dissident architecture, both which center around gun rights in the face of 3D printing revolution, as well as Cody Wilson's role as a pro-Second Amendment innovator.
But her latest film, Forging a Country, is what we'll be talking about today.
And that covers the re-election of President Naya Bukele in El Salvador.
She captures the mood on the streets and behind the scenes in that country during that contest.
You can follow Jessica on X at Jessica Solche, and that's S-O-L-C-E.
Sure. So I made a short film about El Salvador and Nayib Bukele, but specifically the re-election that happened in February 4th, 2024.
And this is on the streets, talking to the people, seeing what's happening, and also seeing what the real mood of El Salvador is, contrasting what the media's mood of what the country ruled by this insane dictator is supposed to be.
So there it is, Forging a Country from Encode Productions, and it's so funny, just as we were watching that, I mean, just seeing him walk down the hall, I would say, I turned the mics off, and I was saying, he's just so cool, and then it comes up, coolest dictator in the world.
We know some characters like this today that they understand, and he comes from a world of marketing, they understand that eyes, whatever eyes they are, are not necessarily bad.
You can utilize them.
You can use this.
And he used it well.
I mean, he literally, one of the first things I ever saw of Naibu Kale when I was researching him, prior to...
Never going to El Salvador before, but being very curious about all the words that the media was using, but then understanding that he was polling at like 91% popularity in his own country.
Right. He went to the UN and basically was like, you guys are fruitless.
Nothing good happens here, but I'm here to represent my people and bring back their pride because we are, we might be a third world country, but we have the ability to Be back.
To grow and expand.
It was just like a very beautiful thing to see.
And that kind of genuine desire to make his country great for lack of words has just spread throughout the country.
It's so funny because it's just such a brilliant and perfect test case that just proves our position about everything.
In other words, it's not You know, we have all these problems in this country and the media and politicians, they act like these are just intractable issues that we have to just change the way we behave to deal with it.
You know, you think about the shoplifting issue in California and their solution as well.
I guess we got to put everything behind, you know, plexiglass.
It's like they're running with all these absurd ideas of allowing the crime more and maybe they just need to be paid a stipend and then they won't feel the need to steal.
And it's like...
No, we know what we need to do.
You throw them in prison.
It's what Naya Bukele did.
So he's provided this brilliant example that's undeniable.
It has been incredibly effective at changing the entire culture and face of his nation, the reputation around the world.
So it's no wonder they hate this guy.
He proves that there is an answer to these problems, that they aren't intractable and they aren't impossible to deal with.
So of course they hate him and demonize him with everything they've got.
There's a few moments in the short film where a gentleman says, we can breathe again.
This is the first time we can breathe.
And it's such a simplistic statement.
But when you realize El Salvadorians couldn't go outside of their house when nightfall happened, they were literally ruled, forced to be collaborators with the gangs, forced to see their own children fall victim, right?
Understanding that the crisis of criminality was just the civil war that must be attacked, he went after that, and that changes everything.
So, you know, the human rights of criminals should not be a thing.
I think.
I try not to put my own bias in my films, but he showed that quite apparently.
Of course, there's going to be some wreckage when things happen.
There's going to be some mistakes, but he was able to turn his country around by just saying, you know what?
The human rights of my people trump that of the gangs.
And it sort of goes to like, what is liberty at the end of the day?
What is freedom at the end of the day?
Because... You know, they call him a dictator, you know, they call him all these horrible words, but at the end of the day, you know, are you really free if you can't go to the park because you're afraid that you're going to be killed, right?
There's this idea that, you know, that the spectrum of freedom goes from just, like, no control at all and totally wild and, like, living in the woods, and that's freedom, and then you have, you know, total control and totalitarianism.
But the reality is that, like...
Freedom requires peace.
You aren't free if you're under threat.
You aren't free if you're afraid of being attacked, if you can't leave your home because gangs control your streets.
You're not free.
So in order to have freedom, you have to have peace.
In order to have peace, you have to have order.
In order to have order, you have to have control of some sort or an authority to punish the people that break the order.
So in an almost ironic way, in order to have liberty, you've got to have...
At least some basic measure of control from the government allowing your people to actually enjoy the fruits of their freedom and go to the park and go to the...
7-Eleven nationalism was a meme a while ago, right?
I want to live in a country where I can leave my girlfriend in the car at 2 in the morning while I run into 7-Eleven and not have to worry about her being raped or killed in the meantime.
Sure. I mean, making this film made me think about what is the what is the most important thing a government can do.
And I actually think the one thing that they should do, like we can talk about all the other things, whether we're anti-government, government, what the, you know, small government, whatever, but just protect its people.
That's... That's the starter.
Yeah. And if you can't do that, how are you going to boost education?
How are you going to do all these other things that we are allowing or paying our taxes to if you can't protect a child on the way to school?
And I was just talking about this earlier in the show, and I use Europe as an example, but America is pretty far down this road as well, of the anarcho-tyranny of the idea that our government is doing so much, and it's so capable, and it's spending billions of dollars doing all of these various things, but it's not protecting the border,
and it's not dealing with criminals, which, as you point out, if you boil the point of government down into like one or two things, it's that.
It's a monopoly on the use of force to protect the citizens from criminals, and it's protecting the people in the country from those outside of the country.
They're not doing that.
They're doing a billion other things, and they're going after you for your memes, but they can't stop the criminals, and it's a choice they're making, and it's deliberate.
And I think it's completely on purpose.
As far as I can tell.
So when you made this documentary, did you go down with any expectation, any presupposition about what the mood of the documentary would be?
When you approached this topic, why did you choose this topic?
And going down to El Salvador to film for the first time, what were you planning to achieve there?
And at that time I was very curious and I started talking to people and talking to people at the hotel.
And first I was struck by how wonderful the people were.
They were just, okay, third world country, you don't know what you're going to...
Everyone was just so genuinely lovely and so excited.
About talking about President Nayib Bukele.
So immediately I understood, okay, something else is happening here.
The people love him.
What is that?
So it kind of just...
Tumbled forward of researching and then the re-election came about.
He's polling at around 91%.
And I decided with a friend of mine that lives in El Salvador who runs the Palestra Society, which is a research organization, to capture it and see what would happen.
So as a documentarian, I really try not to impose my ideas at all.
I want to be a conduit for my characters and therefore try to get as close to an honest, intimate situation and experience as possible for the audience.
So I went down and of course there were certain things that I wanted to get, but I didn't know if I was going to get behind the scenes.
That's awesome.
Just sit down, quote unquote, with Naeem.
I got to see him interacting with his people, with his team, with just his family.
And so it became something a little bit more voyeuristic and lovely in my idea.
And then just talking to people on the street and people actually coming up to me with a camera and saying, I have things to say, like the wonderful gentleman that says, and now you bukel is like the Internet.
Yeah, and I want to get into what Western media says about it, but I wonder, I mean, it's...
You know, we on Infowars probably talk more about El Salvador than the mainstream media does, and obviously because we're celebrating it and we want you to know about it, they don't want you to know that there is a solution to your problem, so they're not going to tell you.
But even as much as we talk about it or the right wing talks about it, I still don't really have a grasp on how he did this, how he achieved this.
Was there opposition in his country?
I mean, we're so used to it in America, like, sure, you might have Trump doing amazing things, Bukele doing amazing things, but you're going to have this group of people that are just seem suicidally opposed to whatever it is and are going to go out and get mad and try to throw things out.
I mean, was there an opposition in El Salvador?
I mean, I'm just I'm blown away by the 91% popularity.
Like that's the type of numbers that you usually get out of like the USSR, like, you know, corrupt country.
So how did he achieve 91% popularity?
Without being a truly totalitarian, authoritarian vote rigger, right?
And as I was saying before the show, it would be one thing if he gets in, he does all these reforms, and he lowers the murder rate a little bit, and it could be a success story.
But to go from the most murderous country to the least murderous country, I mean, it is practically miraculous.
And he's sort of a one-man confirmation of the great man theory of history, right?
I mean, you don't see this happening without Bukele, right?
This wasn't just an inevitability in El Salvador that the mood of the country was there and somebody was going to rise to the occasion.
I mean, it took this guy, this individual, with his attitude, his personality, his traits, his capabilities to do this.
The United States was giving, pumping the Salvadorian military $1 million a day to the tune of $6 billion to fund the civil war, you know, the fight against communism.
And when we decided it was over, it was over.
But, you know, 80,000 Salvadorians were dead.
I think half a million people were displaced.
It caused massive wreckage.
And then during the Clinton Foundation, they shipped back all the criminals, right?
Without telling Salvador, oh, by the way, they're M13 and Barrio 18, the most dangerous and horrifically evil, you know, gang members we could ever create.
And we're just sending them back to you, but don't worry about it.
Yeah. So it went from one civil war that destroyed everything, like ruined their terror.
They had...
El Salvador can grow in the sense of it has volcanoes, it's lush land, it's mineral rich soil.
At the time when I first went there, I was told that nobody was even growing bananas.
All their bananas were basically coming from Guatemala.
They weren't making anything anymore.
So they went from that civil war to a gang civil war that continued to rip the country apart.
So you have a country that has the possibility of growth and of just making their own food.
Literally, they weren't even making their own food.
You can't incrementally reformat your entire country like that.
It has to be hardcore.
You know, I'll ask the crew.
During the break, we should grab the speech.
It must have been a year ago, maybe even more, that I played this incredibly powerful speech by Nia Bukele.
And we don't need to get into it now because I just want to show it later.
But what he does is he makes the argument for why good people have to just be a little bit brutal sometimes.
You know, he's just like, look, this is what we believe.
This is what creates a good country.
And if we are allowing these criminals to run rampant, We're depriving millions of our own citizens from a fulfilling life and able to achieve their potential, so we gotta go to war with this, and it's gotta be war, and you are soldiers, and you're fighting on behalf of God and country,
and that is a righteous cause, and he makes that argument so powerfully, and without those underlying principles, I could see how you could look at the way he treats prisoners and go, oh my god, this is so inhumane, it's dehumanizing, they're treating these people like bugs, but then, you know, when he makes that argument of like, this is what's necessary,
we don't want to do this, but...
Dave basically put us in this position.
It's their fault they're in this position.
I mean, it's incredibly powerful, and it takes his rhetorical talents to get that across in a compelling way.
Because, I mean, did you have any pushback?
I mean, as you were making this documentary, was there anybody that was there going, well, now B. Kelly's good, but, like, he took my son, and my son wasn't in the gang, and that's messed up.
I mean, how much, was there anything negative to be said about him from the average person on the street?
But at that point, like the understanding is, yeah, well, they can't do more until the streets are secured.
Interestingly, when I went back and premiered at a palestra event as well, the Forging a Country, the short film, and I was able to talk to a couple of the young people that were actually working at the theater, which we didn't know.
We knew that they were like pro-opposition.
Are they going to shut it down?
Are they going to get ripped out?
And luckily one of the young ladies talked to me and she was very, very, very open.
And her actual main criticism was, it's just not enough yet.
But she could not actually oppose or say anything terrible about what had happened.
Because her life had still been significantly changed by the security.
Again, it's just amazing, and it's really a crime that this story isn't more well-known in America, and again, it's obvious why, because they don't want you to know that these solutions exist.
I wonder if America could just do this, or if there's something about the fact that El Salvador is so small geographically that allowed Naya B. Kelly to do this and pull this off in a way that...
Would be more difficult in a larger country like America or even Mexico.
Again, I want to get into some of the media's reaction to this.
In terms of your access to Bukele, and you said he sort of thrived on it, we know from Trump and other examples, Elon Musk, a lot of guys have that attitude.
But what has been his attitude towards the negative coverage he's gotten from the West?
Ladies and gentlemen, Harrison Smith, your host, my guest, Jessica Solche.
You can follow her on X, at Jessica Solche, S-O-L-C-E.
Her website, encodeproductions.com.
That's where you can find not only her two feature-length documentaries called No Control and Death Athletic, a dissident architecture, both which have to do with...
3D printed guns and gun control.
But her latest film is the main topic of our conversation today, which is Forging a Country.
And it's a short film, but it's about 33 minutes long, something like that, right?
So not a five-minute short film, but not a feature either, but a compact exploration of the re-election of Naya Bukele.
Forging a Country is the name of the film in CodeProductions.com.
And again, as a filmmaker, Was it hard for you to maintain your neutrality?
I imagine it would be hard not to just go with the narrative that you're seeing and just go, I'm just going to make this a celebration of Bukele.
Did you consciously try to counterbalance the support?
What was your approach going in, sort of knowing that it was going to be so positive for Bukele overall?
Yeah. And I wonder, like, how deep was the average person's understanding about that?
It might be a strange way to ask it, but, like, I know...
You know, when you talk to the average person on the street here, you know, you talk to someone from Infowars and like, you know, about what Trump's doing and it's like, we can get into all the geopolitics and all that, but you ask the average person that doesn't spend all their time on this, they're just like, hey, all I know is eggs are cheaper now.
And so I like that.
I mean, was their appreciation of Niobu Kelly just like, hey, my life is better, so whatever he's doing, I'm for it?
Or was the population really conscious of how exactly it was happening?
And was there a...
What I want to find out is what is necessary to achieve this kind of awakening?
How deep does the information need to go or is it just make people's lives better and they'll like you?
You can take your grandmother to the hospital at night without getting shot.
It's a very simplistic approach to understanding Yeah,
gangs and not taking anything from the gangs and not being in agreement with the gangs, which, you know, previous administrations had been doing that just, I mean, it's, it's, it's a very simplistic thing for El Salvador.
I mean, we have similar problems here, obviously not to the degree that it was in El Salvador, but I always think about the young black kid growing up in a ghetto in America, and the gang is just a part of his life,
and he's sort of screwed from the beginning because of the block he grew up on.
If he doesn't join the gang, they're going to beat him up every single day.
So he's going to join the gang, and he's going to have to commit crimes when he joins the gang.
Then he's in there for life.
Then his whole future is messed up.
So there's this self-fulfilling or the gang feeds itself, right?
The gang creates the conditions where it can thrive by creating the criminality and forcing people into participation with them.
And a lot of people on the left here, they'll talk about the negative aspects or the negative outcome of the black community here.
But they're not willing to, like, go after the gangs.
When at the end of the day, I feel empathy for the young kid that's in that position in America, and I want the gangs to be rounded up and destroyed so that that kid can have a chance again.
It's just that argument doesn't ever seem to be made because in America it's either the left that just wants to coddle and...
You know, things that you can just sunshine and rainbows your way out of this issue where you have the right wing where it's just like, ah, it's all economic or, you know, they don't ever get to the heart of the issue or don't seem to have any sincere empathy for, you know, the actual situation these people grow up in.
So, like, how do we make that argument?
How do we bring the lessons that El Salvador taught to America and talk about this systemic or, you know, cyclical nature of crime here and how you interrupt that process?
If you allow certain things to happen, then of course everyone will push against the border of what is allowed.
That is the human tendency.
What else can I get away with?
What else can I do?
Oh, nothing happened.
Push. Yeah.
So criminals and people that are in unfortunate situations will do the exact same thing because once you're in a cycle of living, why get out of the cycle if there's nothing to break it or change your mind?
Yeah. So yeah, I don't have the way out, but criminality is criminality.
It almost necessitates an outside force because when gangs take over a neighborhood or something, I mean, it's pretty much impossible for the people in that neighborhood to rise up against the gang.
You know, there's a great documentary, Cartel Land.
Sure. My understanding is, so Bukele came into office in 2019, and at that period of time, we don't really know what was happening behind the scenes, but Bukele wasn't the Bukele that we know now that was going after all the criminals and rounding them up,
basically, and putting them in jail.
Then there was a huge killing spree that happened, basically, over 48 hours.
It was in the 80s, around 80 people I believe died.
And the response to that was the state of exception, which was basically giving the government the power to enter these cities and these communities and basically start rounding up people.
Yeah, so, and that's what he describes as the war, right?
He says, we declared war against these people.
and the speech we're about to show you is being given for our radio listeners, is being given to an army.
I mean, it's his army arrayed in front of him, and he is delivering this impassioned speech as their general in this war against criminality in their own country.
I'm going to have to read along because it's in Spanish, but here's a speech from Naya Bukele.
He says it's eight years after the start of this war, so this must have been late 2022, early 2023, when he was just eight months into this declared war against the criminal gangs.
Let's watch.
We've been fighting the war against the gangs.
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And thank God we are winning.
This is a very surprising victory that is nearly within our grasp.
Values such as bravery, such as courage, such as strength, discipline.
Patriotism, honor, loyalty, and love for your fellow man.
These are fundamental values for human society, but these values are increasingly scarce in the world.
If you watch the international news, you'll see how the most important values for human beings, such as honor, loyalty, bravery, courage, and love for your fellow man, are precisely the values that we are losing with each passing day.
And that's why you can see how societies that seem to have won are now degrading, as they're losing the values that made them great.
These values were probably not strong in this land, and they were strong in other lands, and that's why those lands grew and became great, but they're losing those values now.
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And on the other hand, in El Salvador, the values that previously were degraded in our country are now the most important ones.
If the crew can either print that or just scroll down for me, I'd love to read this article.
U.S. rates El Salvador safer for U.S. travelers.
So, yeah, we give these travel ratings to different countries.
Obviously, it was very low on the list or, you know, had a very high warning.
They came along with it for a while because I guess they just have the headline there.
But that's a major accomplishment.
I mean, you know, the American government doesn't just hand that out for nothing.
You had to actually achieve quite a bit.
And again, I wonder, you know, you talk about the Clinton Foundation a little bit.
I know Trump has sort of had some not very kind words to say about Bukele recently, and that sort of confused people because everybody's like, what the hell, dude?
He's just like you.
Why are you?
But I think my interpretation of this, and you can tell me if you disagree, it seems like...
As he was trying to achieve what he's been able to achieve, he probably didn't get a lot of help from America.
He probably was hampered by American organizations, institutions who were probably running a little defense for the gangs.
And so he ended up going to places like China and getting their help and getting their investment.
And they were willing to work with him and willing to help him achieve his goals.
And so he worked with China.
America doesn't like that.
Trump obviously has a big issue with China being in our backyard, South and Central America.
But it makes sense for Bukele going, hey, America clearly is run by people who are on the side of the gangs.
So I need help.
I'm going to go with people who are helping me.
That happens to be China.
What do you think about that?
Has China helped El Salvador and Bukele achieve this?
And what role did the Clinton Foundation play?
What do you think the role that America has played?
And they have a brand new, very technologically forward library that China helped build.
And when I say helped build, every single piece.
Inside that library, I was told even like the outlet pieces, every single piece is made in China.
But they built this entire new library, something that they didn't have before, something that society needed then.
So I think in the past, obviously, we have always had our hand in El Salvador, sending 16...
6 billion during the Civil War.
The whole situation of remittances between countries with illegal immigration.
This doesn't happen.
This is not a one-sided event.
Countries allow this to happen because they want the remittances and the United States allows it to happen because the border is opened.
So there's always been a collaboration.
If during the beginning of Bukele's presidency, if his persona non grata, he needed, I mean, everybody needs, it is a game of war, a game of war of governments.
We can't get around that.
You need people on your side.
And I would think that China was like, we're more than happy to invest in your country.
It makes sense, and it's the same thing that's happening in Africa.
America tends to express its international influence through military, and China's decided that We'll just build things for people.
We'll invest in people or help them build this library and that actually ends up being a better way of getting people on your side than fostering a civil war in their country and sponsoring the death squads as they take out the communist infiltrators.
It's like, yeah, maybe just we could be nice and spend that six billion building infrastructure and then they'd have a nice country and be friends with us rather than destitute and...
And, you know, if Trump or Americans are mad that China's making these inroads, it's like, well...
You had the first opportunity, you had dibs on this, and you decided to foster war instead and support the criminals instead.
So here's the story from Reuters that we were just showing.
The United States gave El Salvador a safer travel rating on Tuesday that groups it with the least dangerous countries for Americans to visit, citing reduced gang activity and violent crime.
Obviously the library is a big shining trophy that they put forward.
But probably the first...
Most people heard about Bukele, and it was probably the first I heard about him, was when he went on Bitcoin.
I mean, he did the Bitcoin, and it was like, I remember very distinctly being like, they're going to harvest Bitcoin from a volcano, and that's going to be their now?
I mean, it was this crazy idea.
Obviously, you've done a lot of work with Cody Wilson, and your previous documentaries had to do with 3D printing, which is somewhat tangentially related to the crypto world, but how much has the tech world and crypto played into this, do you think?
And again, I wonder if it's the fact that El Salvador is the size that it is.
is they had this opportunity to make these really unique and transformational changes that, like, obviously America can't just go to Bitcoin all of a sudden because the whole world relies on our economy and it would cause disruption everywhere.
But the fact that El Salvador is so small, not to denigrate it, but it was able to be flexible enough to make these changes.
We can go ahead and take it down, but you're getting a standing ovation for talking about removing the corrupt judges.
People recognize that that's the sticking point now.
So many people have seen what El Salvador has been through, what Nia B. Kelly has been able to achieve, and I, for one, I know a lot of other people have wondered, how did they pull this off?
And the film Forging a Country tells at least some of the story from on the ground, what it was like, how people experienced it.
Forging a Country.
You can follow Jessica at JessicaSolche, S-O-L-C-E, at JessicaSolche on X, and the website Encode Productions.