Edward Slavsquat (Riley Waggerman) critiques Brand Zero Naturals’ ethical claims while debunking Western narratives on Russia’s COVID-19 response, revealing Sputnik V’s ties to AstraZeneca and inconsistent QR enforcement. They compare Putin to Macron, exposing raw material exports as a "conveyor belt" economy, and dismiss global warming as a fabricated crisis. The SMO in Ukraine is framed as a "mafia game," with occult theories like "Slavic culling" and systemic propaganda—backed by MI6, Soros, or Boris Johnson’s sabotage of Minsk accords—driving division among once-united Slavs, suggesting deeper forces normalize endless conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
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And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
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Squats and Russian Realities00:15:34
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Welcome to the Dellingpod.
Riley Waggerman, aka Edward Slav Squat.
Is it Slav Squat?
It is.
Slav Squat.
Tell me, why did you choose the name, the pseudonym Edward Slav Squat?
It was a joke that I came up with with my friend, the late great journalist Marko Marjanovich, who unfortunately passed away in August.
But it was sort of a play on the whole Edward Snowden thing because we were both very confused by the whole Edward Snowden narrative.
Like, where did this guy come from?
Where did he go?
He just like vanished into Russia somewhere.
And Slav Squad is sort of an internet meme.
I don't know if you're familiar with like the Gopnik meme of Eastern Europe, but it's the guys in the Adida track suits who are chain smoking and drinking the beer and they're squatting.
Like the physical, you know, and they're sitting there smoking.
They're very nice people, by the way.
They're real.
So I took on this moniker Edward Slavsquad, and that's when I started actually writing for Marco's website, Anti-Empire, about the COVID situation in Russia.
That's the name I use because at the time I was actually working for RT, so I decided to not use my real name for a while.
Okay.
And you look like an Orthodox monk, and you're not, but you've definitely got the beard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I guess I've become very lazy.
And also, on account of my balding, I'm very self-conscious.
I'm just trying to get as much hair as I can on my face.
We can have a bald off.
Yeah, I've got the ponytail, which is just, I mean, it's shameful, but I can't let go, even though it's falling out every day.
You know, the Orthodox monks, they sort of pride themselves on the more sort of matted and mankey they look, because they don't want to be thought to be vain.
So they have to look kind of...
Right, to my credit, I don't try to make it pretty.
I just let it grow, you know.
And so you were in Russia.
You're living in Russia for quite a while.
Yes.
I was there for actually a little at this point.
By the time I left in August of last year, it was more than 10 years, a little more than 10 years.
And so you're American.
Yes.
And you obviously speak Russian.
Yeah, I mean, my Russian should be better than it is, but I can get by, absolutely.
Right.
And when did you learn it?
Did you learn it formally or did you learn it sort of on the job?
I learned it on the job when I came, when I first came to Russia.
You know, a lot of people, I think, come to Russia for, I don't know, like religious reasons or they have sort of, you know, a bone to pick with their own horrible government and they see Russia.
Right.
I sort of ended up in Russia by accident, you know?
Like, I was just sort of a wandering 20-something American who was trying to make it, just being basically a freeloader teaching English, you know?
And I was in Czechia and I said, I got to do something more interesting with my life.
And I found a job in Bashkortostan, which is a republic within the Russian Federation.
And so I arrived in Russia.
I was just sort of, I was totally neutral.
You know, I didn't really care that much about, you know, I didn't come to Russia for specific reasons.
I just was there because it sounded interesting.
And so I had no background in anything Russia-related, didn't speak a lick of Russian.
I mean, to be fair, there are similarities between Czech and Russian, and I knew a little bit of Czech.
But yeah, so I just learned it all on the job, basically.
Right.
Yeah, I should, I should put my, you, you, you have a rough idea of where I'm coming from because you've, you've read some of my stuff.
I. I'd never been to Russia until recently when I went on this trip paid for by the Moscow Patriarchate.
And the trip was for Christians.
So there were some Catholics on the trip.
There was some sort of Protestant guy and then there was me.
And we were looked after by a friend of yours.
And it was, well, it was great.
I mean, I wouldn't have gone to Russia unless this trip had happened.
It's a hard sell to your wife when you just say, I've decided, darling, I'm going to go to Russia.
why but if if you've been invited you suddenly got your seat like that look what can i do i i I have to go.
And I had a great time there.
I mean, I was really taken by things like The covered markets that I think are all over all over the Russian cities with just the most amazing produce.
I had no idea that Russia had access to all this, you know, raw milk.
And well, I mean, they've got everything, haven't they?
They've got got because they've got so many different access to seas, they've got things like Kamchatka crabs and they've got fish from the north and they've got all their all their river fish and they've got so much land.
And also, I do, I have to say, love the Orthodox Church.
I went into some of those churches at what was it called?
They don't call it Mass, do they?
What do they call it?
The Divine Liturgy.
And the singing was amazing.
And the babushkas with their, all the women with their, with their.
And also, I'm really into my Russian literature, which unfortunately I've only read in translation, but I like my Tolstoy.
I like my Dostoevsky.
I just think the Russian novelists are the best in the world.
But you're going to provide a corrective because I've had some massive Russophiles on the podcast and I've had some sort of anti-Russophiles as well.
Sorry, sorry, anti-Russophiles, Russophobes.
So you can sort of put me right on where I've got it wrong.
I mean, am I wrong to love Russia?
Absolutely not.
I mean, I have many.
I mean, I don't think that you could stay in Russia if you absolutely hated it, right?
I mean, I basically agree with everything you just said.
I mean, it's, first of all, I would encourage anyone who has the means, whether it's through invitation.
I mean, obviously, it's a lot easier to get there when a lot of the bureaucracy is sort of taken care of, you know, right?
Like, like, really, even when they want you to come, even, yeah, even when they want you to come, it can be a huge headache.
So, I totally get that.
And I think that if I, you know, if anyone has that opportunity, they should take it for any, it doesn't matter what the actual motive is of who's inviting you or whatever.
Just go and see the country for yourself because, yeah, I think that you'll be surprised.
And it's a wonderful experience.
You know, like, do it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, look, it's an incredible misunderstood, beautiful, but also, you know, very sad, I would say.
Also, like, Russia's got everything.
It's like a Tolstoy novel.
It really is.
Yeah.
So I think it is.
Funny that, isn't it?
It is, it is.
I mean, Tolstoy, I guess, did a very good job of explaining his country.
When I read Anna Karenina, I realized that I was never going to read a novel better than this.
I think Anna Karenina is the best novel that's ever been written.
And I totally identified with Lievin and his wanting to kind of live on the land and the wonderful scenes where they go duck shooting and the scenes with the peasants.
And this was sort of born out when I liked the Russians.
I mean, okay, that's a terrible generalization.
But they're serious, they're deep, they're cultured.
And these are valuable things.
You look at the West and you see, I mean, in a way, it's not the West's fault.
It's the people who run the West, the predator class, or whatever you want to call them, the people who are deliberately running down everything and destroying people's culture, destroying people's community.
I hate to use the word community, but the elites are at war with us.
And you sort of, when you go to Russia, you feel that, well, one of the things I quite liked is that because they've lived so long under communism, they're very suspicious of the state, aren't they?
They don't.
In England, people still bizarrely imagine that they live in a democracy and that by voting they can change stuff.
Whereas Russians are under no illusions on that score.
Yeah, I would have, I would, I mean, of course it's a generalization, but I would basically completely agree.
I think that if you took your average Russian and probably compared them, I've never been to the UK, but if you took your average Brit and your average Russian, I'm sure that the Russian would be more jaded, more suspicious of authority, like less, you know, they would understand their place in the pecking order, as opposed to the Brit who would have these grand illusions of, oh, my vote counts.
Like, I have power, you know?
Yeah, we're free.
We live in a Western democracy.
I think there's this legacy attitude where, well, A, we've been encouraged relentlessly to think of Russians as a threat, as a war threat.
We've been, we, I suppose, by we, I mean the sort of, I suppose, the British Empire, have been shafting the Russians since what, since the beginning of the Great Game at least, and probably earlier.
I mean, I don't know what we were doing in the time of, say, Catherine the Great, but it seems to me that for a long time, Britain has seen Russia as a geopolitical threat which must be destroyed, which is pretty much what happened when the Milner group arranged the First World War with two purposes.
One, to destroy Germany, and as a sort of secondary mission to destroy Russia.
And they funded the Bolshevik Revolution, which was not really carried out mainly by Russians, was it?
Was a particular faction, the Bolsheviks, who I suppose were mainly Jews.
There was a sort of horrible sort of occultic things going on with the murder of the Tsar and so on.
And we're told that the Russians are baddies and a threat.
So I kind of feel for them as well as the sort of the underdog that we helped turn into an underdog.
Is that a fair assessment?
Well, I guess I would agree broadly.
I guess maybe where I see things a little bit differently is, you know, I do I do feel horrible for the Russian people, their leadership and elite.
I really can't.
I mean, again, this is we can nitpick, but if we're talking broadly, they're really not that different from the Western elite.
Yes.
You know, and so people, I mean, we can get into it, and I'm totally open to having the conversation about the differences where, you know, and I understand the perspective of, well, let's be pragmatic about this.
But really, at the end of the day, I think that what we're witnessing is, you know, basically there's the, it's like two gangs.
You have like the, you know, the George Bugs Moran's Northside gang versus Al Capone's Chicago outfit.
And people are being told that they should be rooting for one side or the other.
Maybe they're not all in it together, but they're playing the same game and they're all thugs, you know?
And at the end of the day, this is a system that unapologetically destroys human life in the pursuit of money and power.
And so I think that a lot, unfortunately, a lot of the narratives that we see that are very prevalent, both in the mainstream media and the so-called alternative media, it's basically just talking points for the peasantry so that they feel better about basically, you know, being taking advantage of this international thuggery.
You haven't told me anything so far that I would quibble with.
And I've written about this.
I said, look, okay, just because Putin probably did have a pretty good Cassus belly in Ukraine.
And just because the Ukrainian regime are Nazi puppets of the Western deep state doesn't mean that Putin is a goodie and he's our guy fighting for freedom and fighting the new world order.
So yeah, it doesn't surprise me, but you can give me lots more detail on this.
You were very good, for example, fighting this notion that a lot of, I think, awake people had in the West that somehow Russia responded differently to COVID and that somehow the Sputnik vaccine was not as toxic as the Moderna one and all the different, the Pfizer one and AstraZeneca.
AstraZeneca vs. Sputnik00:15:25
I mean, they were just as bad, weren't they?
Yeah, and well, I mean, I don't think we should even get too deep into it because it's just, at this point, I just consider it, if you don't understand the basics at this point, I don't know what I can do for you.
But just very briefly, you know, Sputnik V was developed in cooperation with AstraZeneca.
So this whole meme of Sputnik V being like the anti-big pharma vax, it's so comically wrong.
Like you can go to the Kremlin's website and read the transcript of a meeting between Vladimir Putin, the CEO of AstraZeneca, Alexander Ginsburg, this total creepo weirdo who allegedly claims to have developed Sputnik V, and Kirill Dmitriev, who, by the way, is a, you know, a WEF young global leader, Stanford Harvard grad, who worked for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey and Company, the CEO of Russia Sovereign Wealth Fund, who is now the head negotiator for the Ukraine talks, you know,
meeting with these super turbo-patriots like Witkoff and Kushner, you know, about deciding the fate of Ukraine.
Anyway, these guys all meet together in December 2020 talking about how they should start doing joint studies together between Sputnik V and AstraZeneca because they're basically identical.
That's almost a verbatim quote from Alexander Ginsburg.
They're so similar.
Why don't we start doing joint tests where you do one shot of Sputnik V and one shot of AstraZeneca and that'll be extra safe and effective.
You know, it's so, it's like, it's so, and the, I mean, again, I don't even, I don't even think it's necessary to get too deep into it, but the vaccine thing is such a good example of how people were being played off each other.
Because, you know, in Russia, you had like these liberals who didn't trust, you know, you had people who didn't trust the Sputnik V vax, so they wanted to get the Pfizer vax.
They would go to the West to get shot up with Moderna.
And then you had Westerners who were like, I don't trust Pfizer-Moderna.
I want to get Sputnik V. And it's all the same genetic goop that hasn't been tested and no one knows what the hell it is.
It's just like, come on.
It's just ridiculous.
And I mean, I suppose we're seeking the point of difference between the Laos and the Flea here.
I do know that there was this weird trajectory of the AstraZeneca so-called vaccine, whereby there was an occasion at Wimbledon, I don't know whether you saw it, where the woman who'd been in charge of the AstraZeneca vaccine was given a standing ovation.
Oh, God.
And I think she was made a dame and something.
And then about what, a year later, 18 months later, AstraZeneca was suddenly toxic.
And everyone was saying they thought it did more damage even than the Pfizer or the Moderna jabs.
So if the Sputnik V was based on the AstraZeneca, that tells you all you need to know.
And how rigorous were they in Russia in enforcing this?
How easy was it to not be jabbed?
Well, so again, this is another misconception.
Let's put it, let's be charitable and use that word, that many Westerners have.
Russia absolutely had compulsory vaccination decrees that basically covered, blanketed the entire country, and it was enforced in different ways.
So, for example, it would be a situation where businesses were required to get like 60% of their employees vaccinated, or if you were a university student, you need to get vaccinated.
By autumn of 2021, they basically, almost every single region of Russia had some form of QR code coded health pass, which is basically de facto compulsory vaccination.
Because in order to, you know, you have this, you know, this digital health pass that shows you've been vaccinated, or you have to get PCR tested every 72 hours in order to enter a restaurant.
Now, the truth is that in certain parts of Russia, but by far, there were some very, very, it depended on where you were, basically.
Some regions and areas and cities enforced it very strictly.
Others were very lax about it, or the authorities sort of looked the other way because they realized how damaging this was to the economy and like civilization itself.
And then also there was a very lively like black market in Russia for fake vaccine certificates, fake PCR tests.
Like you could just go onto Telegram and find, like you could just like order a fake PCR test, for example.
But like that's, you know, to me, that's not, to me, that shows like that's a thumbs up to the Russian people.
It's not, that does not reflect well on the Russian government.
The Russian government itself wanted this to happen.
You know, another thing I have to say, again, there's this misconception that, at least I've seen this idea put forward that all of these policies were done at the regional level and Putin was secretly fighting it and he didn't want this to happen.
By December of 2021, the state Duma, so we're talking about the national legislature parliament, wanted to create a nationwide health pass.
So instead of having these regional health passes, you had one unified Russian health pass, which was publicly endorsed by Putin.
He said, you know, I know a lot of people think that I should oppose this, but it's my responsibility as president to keep everyone safe.
And we need this national health pass, which is de facto compulsory vaccination required to do anything, like to go to a shop, to go to a hospital, anything, you know, go to school.
So what were the regions that emerged with credit here?
Where was the resistance?
Well, I would say that it was more like probably like in far-flung areas of Siberia, right, where it just didn't even make any sense.
Possibly.
I mean, to be honest, I remember very well, for example, there were sort of like flashes of resistance.
So, for example, in St. Petersburg, I forget the gentleman's name, but he was a business owner who owned hookah lounges.
Like he had a chain of hookah lounges in St. Petersburg, and he said, I'm not doing this.
I'm not doing the QR code thing.
I'm not going to ask for QR codes at my hookah place.
And he was arrested.
He was charged with bribery, with some made-up bribery scheme.
He was arrested.
I don't even know what happened to him.
But yeah, the FSB nabbed him.
There were also, you know, in Moscow.
Again, and this is to the credit of the Russian people, Moscow was the first city to adopt some form of QR-coded health pass in the summer of 2021.
And basically, Russians just boycotted it.
And so Sabianin, who's the mayor of Moscow, had to drop the QR code thing after about like two and a half weeks because restaurants were closing like and like the economy was collapsing, you know?
So yeah, I mean, like I, in that sense, it was a privilege to live in Russia because a lot of Russians just didn't trust.
They knew that it was, this was nonsense, you know?
And so that was great.
But I didn't feel safe.
It wasn't the Russian government that made me feel safe.
No, no, no.
It was the Russian people.
Yeah.
Yes, but that, but don't knock it.
I mean, that is that.
What you're describing there is a wonderful thing.
It is.
It's great.
And I think to be fair on the awake people who are pro-Russia, I think most of them see that.
They see that distinction.
They're not cheering on.
Well, actually, some of them are.
Some of them are cheering.
Some of them have.
I mean, I'm sorry to say, but some of them are just lying.
Some of them are claiming that the Russian government saw through it all and were just playing along and nothing bad happened.
It's just not.
It's not true.
5D chess.
Exactly.
It's just not true.
And if you want the evidence for that, all you have to do is look at the actual human toll of COVID in Russia.
In 2021, Russia saw the largest natural population decline since the end of World War II.
It was more than a million people.
And so you factor in just normal deaths plus probably what can be attributed to public health policies that actually just murdered people.
We're talking about several hundred thousand people who were killed within a year because by the vaccine.
Well, we don't know.
We don't know because also Russia, I mean, if you think that transparency was bad in the West, Russia didn't even pretend to have any publicly available information about post-vaccination complications.
My theory, though, is that, okay, it could be from vaccination complications.
But also, just like in the West, Russia completely reformatted its entire healthcare system to fight COVID.
So people with cancer were just like thrown to the streets.
Everyone had COVID.
You would get the, you know, they had these things called like the red, the red wards, where you would, you were said that they would just take like old people with Alzheimer's or, you know, dementia who had no one to take care of.
They would grab them, give them a PCR test, say that they had COVID, throw them into this ward where no one was allowed to visit them.
They were pumped full of disgusting medications and just left to die.
Possibly midazolam.
Do you think that Russia bought some of that?
It was, I forget the, it was, it was one of those horrible drugs that they claimed was fighting COVID, which Russia was also using.
Anyway, it was like, it's the same.
It was the same playbook.
You know, it was absolutely the same playbook that we saw everywhere else in the world.
Yes.
Yes.
Do you.
How much autonomy does Putin have?
Because of course, in the mainstream media in the West, everything is Putin that, Putin this.
He is putler.
He is the.
And I've spoken to other people.
Well, you must know Yuri Roshka.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And Yuri told me a while back when I went to Moldova, he said Putin is just the creature of Chabad, of the oligarchs, of Israel.
He's not this, he has no autonomy.
Is that true?
Well, yeah, I love the way that Roska talks about Putin.
Like, I've interviewed him.
I do written interviews, and I've begged him to answer some of my questions a few times now.
And the way that Roska explains Putin, he says, you know, Putin is not the putler that we hear about in the West.
He's not this bloodthirsty monster.
He's also not the turbo-patriot that you read about in so-called alternative media.
He's actually just this very mediocre, careerist political.
He's just like Macron, but he's Russian Macron.
And the cultural differences are real, but that's because it's Russia.
You can't have pride parades in downtown Moscow because it's Russia.
But Putin serves certain moneyed interests.
And the thing that Roscoe also points out, which is absolutely correct, is that Putin is guided by a merchant mentality, which is true of basically every world leader.
Yeah, he serves money interests.
His entire agenda, I mean, the top priority is making money for the rich people and helping preserve that money and power, you know, by extension.
And we see that very, very clearly, by the way, in what has occurred during the so-called special military operation, even how it's being negotiated, the hopefully negotiated end of this ridiculous conflict is so economic focused for a very good reason.
Because at the end of the day, this is just business.
And so Putin, in that sense, he, of course, also there's a huge amount of time, money, and energy put towards basically presenting Putin as a certain, you know, in a certain way to patriots, but that's just all for public consumption.
You know, like you got it, you got to make everything digestible.
So, you know, that's what it is.
And in that sense, he's no different from any other politician.
And I really mean this.
I don't consider him to be worse than anyone else, but certainly not better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you took issue when I said, look, one of the great things about Russia is at least you haven't got to put up with net zero.
Now, I mean, you haven't been to the UK, but I can tell you, we now have the highest energy costs in Europe.
We have this insane apparatchic.
I think he's an asset rather than a handler.
There's something sort of so disingenuous about him that I don't think he's cunning.
I just think he's being used.
A guy called Ed Miliband, who's in charge of our energy policy.
And he wants to fill the North Sea with windmills and carpet the land with windmills and force everyone to have solar panels on their roofs.
And everything is getting a lot more expensive.
So from that perspective, Russia looks pretty great.
Sure.
Because it's an energy where you've got no shortage of gas and oil.
And surely you're not going to tell me that it costs more to heat your home in Russia or to drive your car in Russia than it does in the UK.
Well, I don't know what the prices are in the UK right now, but actually petrol prices in Russia have been skyrocketing.
They might still be cheaper than in the UK.
I couldn't tell you.
But, you know, I guess that if we're talking about sort of energy independence, yeah, on paper, obviously, Russia is, I mean, Russia has everything.
Russia could theoretically just shut its borders and just live on what it has, you know, what is naturally for time immemorial.
The problem, of course, is that Russia hasn't actually developed a lot of these resources to be used domestically.
It just exports them all.
It's the world's conveyor belt for natural resources.
And the entire economic policy that has developed under Putin is this idea that we export our raw materials to the West.
They make the stuff and then they send it back to Russia and we buy it.
You even have this stuff even with lumber, even with lumber, you can find incredible quotes from Putin himself saying he's talking about how he's surprised that Russia is importing wooden boards from China.
And this wood is coming from Russia, right?
It's exported to China.
China turns it into boards and sends it back to Russia.
It's like, what are we doing?
This is madness.
Yes.
Yeah.
Depends on the Industry00:02:25
So the life of a kind of, say you're a sort of, say you want a kind of middle class life with not too much nonsense from the government.
How far is that possible to achieve in Russia?
Or are you constantly aware of the dead hand of the state ruining everything?
I would say that it's a, again, it's a difficult question to answer because it'll depend a lot on what sort of industry you're in.
I mean, for example, if you own a business, you absolutely are going to be dealing with all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense.
I mean, I've heard this even from Russians who are very patriotic and proud of their country.
They 100%, the first thing they'll tell you is how difficult it is to be an entrepreneur in Russia just because the country is so based on like nepotism.
You have to go through so many hoops just to do the simplest thing.
And at the end of the day, it's just like who you know, which of course, again, is really not that different from basically anywhere in the world, but it's doubly bad in Russia, I would say.
For example, though, you talk about like in the United States, now that I'm back in my wonderful homeland, you know, like you have a solid middle class of basically, you know, like lawyers and doctors, right?
Who can overcharge you for everything and live very comfortably.
And poison you and poison you.
Right, right.
Do the opposite.
Do the opposite of everything they're supposed to do for you and then take your money.
In Russia, like salaries for doctors are almost non-existent.
Like there's a huge problem with creating like a functioning class of medical professionals and all sorts of other people just because salaries are so incredibly low.
Like the people who are making money are working in oil fields, basically.
They do these rotations where they fly out to somewhere in Siberia and work for 30 days non-stop.
And then it's a rotation thing, you know, and that's where a lot of people make their money.
But yeah, like it's hard.
I mean, again, I think it's, I don't want to overgeneralize without having like all the data in front of me.
But yeah, like I think that the middle class in Russia probably suffers at least as much as the middle class everywhere else.
Cartels And Class Suffering00:02:26
I mean, everyone is living hand to mouth, basically, as far as I can tell.
Like in the United States and Russia, I'm assuming in the UK, life is expensive.
Inflation never ends.
All of our currencies are totally debased and becoming increasingly more useless.
Salaries don't rise with the cost of everyday staple necessities.
Yeah, it sucks.
Yeah.
Well, I suppose this is all the new world order, isn't it?
I mean, it's not like when they, whoever they are, are planning their new world order, they're not going to go, well, we're going to have one, we're going to have the Western world, which is going to be one thing, and we're going to let the Russians and the Chinese do what they want.
They're all in on it, aren't they?
At the highest levels.
Yeah, you know, again, I don't, like, I agree.
Again, I agree.
But again, I think like, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, you know, a criticism that I receive is like, oh, this guy just says, they're all in together and it's just like so vague and what does he know and blah, blah, blah.
You know, on a certain level, actually, I think that's a totally valid criticism.
I don't think that we should rely too much on these generalizations.
But again, I'll go back to my mafia, you know, metaphor.
Like, maybe they're not, they're not, they're in, they're all in and out together in the sense they're all playing the same game.
You know, like they're all, they're all playing by the same rules.
And in that sense, like you don't, like, for example, you have a feud between two, you know, drug cartels fighting over territory.
It's against the rules to go snitching to the cops, right?
Like, sometimes it happens, but you're not supposed to do that.
And if you do, you get killed, right?
And so they're all playing the same game.
And so when you're told to support one side or the other, you have to realize that you're just supporting one side of the same game.
And, you know, just like, you know, to continue with the analogy, you know, like Al Capone would hire newspaper men to play up how he gave a carton of milk to some orphanage or, you know, like make like, oh, he was such a nice guy.
Like he really cared about the community.
And, you know, at the end of the day, he's just a cutthroat businessman, you know?
Yeah, it's like it's like J.D. Rockefeller handing out dimes.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Why The Donbas War Continues00:15:29
Like, here you go.
Here's your little penny.
And all everyone, posterity remembers.
Everyone's got a personal memory of the day that kindly Mr. Burns gave them a dime.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so you just have to try to realize that the way that we perceive world events and world leaders, I guess specifically, like so much of it is just marketing.
And you just have to take a step back and realize so many of these narratives are just for peasant consumption.
And at the higher level, there are things going on.
I mean, the SMO is such a good example of this because the narratives are so emotionally charged and so ideologically driven.
But then at the same time, you have Russia until the start of 2025 paying Ukraine to transit its gas across the territory of Ukraine to sell to the EU, which is then giving Ukraine weapons to kill Russians.
Like it doesn't make any sense.
It's so absurd and obscene.
So you have this idea, oh, Nazi Ukraine, we've got to kill Zelensky, the horrible Nazi thug.
Okay, great, but why are you paying him?
Why are you filling his coffers with rubles or whatever to transit gas across the territory of Ukraine as Ukrainians and Russians are vaporizing each other?
Yes.
Yes.
I've heard that.
I think it was from Yuri.
A deal has been struck whereby Putin is not allowed to take out Zelensky.
Zelensky is completely bulletproof.
That's from an interview.
I think it's with the former Prime Minister of Israel, Bennett, if I'm remembering correctly.
And he said in an interview, I think with The Guardian, that Putin reassured him that he would never, that he wouldn't touch Zelensky.
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skull juggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that one.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
Yes.
Yes.
I've heard that.
I think it was from Yuri.
A deal has been struck whereby Putin is not allowed to take out Zelensky.
Zelensky is completely bulletproof.
That's from an interview.
I think it's with the former Prime Minister of Israel, Bennett, if I'm remembering correctly.
And he said in an interview, I think with The Guardian, that Putin reassured him that he would never, that he wouldn't touch Zelensky.
Yeah, so because obviously, okay, so there is the, on the SMO, there is the narrative in the mainstream media, which I notice more and more is so heavily controlled by, what, MI6.
I mean, it might as well be repeating MI6 press releases, frankly.
And that narrative has it, Putler is evil.
He's hell-bent on conquest.
That's why he took the Crimea.
And that's why he invaded this innocent sovereign state country full of gambling lambs and innocent, beautiful, golden-haired children who all they wanted was peace.
And it was a lovely country, Ukraine, not at all controlled by the CIA since 1948.
No Nazis anywhere.
And Zelensky in his magnificent Zelensky green T-shirt is a statesman.
And he's extraordinary.
And we must send more storm shadow missiles so that we can take out all those evil Russians who are.
So you get this narrative.
And oh yeah, and the Butcher massacre, we're told, was carried out by evil, terrible Ruskis.
And then you get the alternative kind of awake persons in the West take on this, which is this is all bollocks.
It's an SMO that it follows the colour revolution carried out in 2014, funded by George Soros, planned by Victoria Newland and people like that.
Often people with sort of Kazarian beef, ancestral beef with the Russians, and the reason that Russia didn't take Kiev is because that was never the plan.
They wanted just keep the Donbass and to protect the Russian-speaking peoples and stuff.
And the Russians are running rings around the Ukrainians, yada, yada, yada.
So you get this massively anti-Russian narrative in the mainstream, pretty strongly pro-Russian narrative in the...
We also, of course, those of us who value facts, know that Boris Johnson was dispatched in order to sabotage the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements.
which would have brought this war to an end, which is killing boys from both sides.
They're all being massacred in the meat grinder.
No one wants them to die.
So Boris Johnson has blood on his hands.
And his mysterious backer, I think, paid him a million pounds to participate in this.
So we get all that, but the war goes on.
Tell me what's really happening.
Look, I mean, when I write about the SMO, which I have been openly critical of since before it even started, actually, but I've never hid in my opposition to this conflict.
And the reason why I opposed it was because you have to realize, okay, like when I try to interpret what's happening or how effective this SMO has been, I try to take the Kremlin's perspective.
I say, okay, this is what the Russian government said it wanted to accomplish in Ukraine.
Like, these are the motives.
This is what provoked it.
From the Kremlin's perspective, this is what they're saying.
This is their mindset.
And you have to recognize that all the problems that needed to be solved before February of 2022 are like a thousand times worse now after four years of war.
So, you know, like the, like, for example, one of the biggest beefs that the Kremlin allegedly had against the West was NATO's eastward expansion.
NATO has expanded over the last four years.
The militarization of Ukraine and Ukraine's relationship with NATO has grown by – I don't even know if there's a multiplier large enough to describe how much more militarized and NATO-integrated Ukraine is compared to when before this war started.
So unfortunately, the way that I view this, and to go even a step further, and this goes beyond NATO even.
It's so tragic that you have a situation where you had really two brotherly peoples, you know, part of basically the same sort of civilizational concept that are now going to be permanently, like, we're talking about a permanent divorce at this point.
I mean, it will take a very, very long time for Russians and Ukrainians to come to terms with what has occurred.
Of course, the problem started long before the SMO, but the SMO, it totally exacerbated all these problems and made it much, much more difficult to come to some kind of common understanding and try to like forgive each other.
It's like it's really, really bad.
And what you have to realize is that the Kremlin perspective on this, like you have an interview that I've cited several times with Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister.
2018 is giving this interview to Russian media.
And the Russian journalist says, this is 2018.
We should recognize Donetsk and Lugansk as independent.
And yeah, like, why don't we do that?
And Lavrov says to them, well, okay, so what happens after that?
The journalist replies, then we defend this territory.
Like we send in Russian troops to protect Donetsk and Lugansk.
And Lavrov says, like that, people say that, but they don't understand what they're actually saying.
What they're actually saying is that if we went to war with Ukraine, if we sent Russian troops into Donetsk and Lugansk and declared them independent and separate from Ukraine, we lose the rest of Ukraine forever.
Like you are, you are severing the country along that line, and the rest of Ukraine is now in the sphere of the collective West or the satanic NATO, you know, Kabbalah or whatever you want to call it.
Like you lose, you lose this part of Ukraine, which used to be part of, you know, like it's no longer part of the Russian world on any level.
And that's like we are witnessing that, but the problem is to make it even worse, like Lavrov saw the worst case scenario, but we're actually in a situation that's worse than the worst case scenario envisioned by Lavrov because Russia hasn't actually taken Donetsk and Lukans,
like all of Donetsk yet, which means that there's going to have to be like some very painful negotiations in order, like in order to get these territories that are still under Ukraine control, you either going to have much, much more bloodshed and devastation, or they're going to have to make some very painful compromises.
And let's not also forget that Ukraine still occupies Kherson and Zaporozhia.
These are cities of what Russia declared as regions of the Russian Federation that are under control of Ukraine.
So how are you getting those back?
There doesn't seem to be acknowledgement.
Every day I read, I see the headlines from our beautiful alternative media about how Russia's kicking ass in Ukraine and making all these incredible advances.
We're talking about advances of like five kilometers in a region that Russia needs to take at a bare minimum in order to accomplish anything worthwhile in Ukraine.
But the reality is when this conflict ends, Ukraine is now totally in the West's sphere of influence.
There can be no more discussion about Ukraine being part of the Russian world anymore.
And that goes beyond geopolitics.
That goes beyond whatever weird website you're reading about 5D chess.
That's really painful for a lot of Russians and Ukrainians who have family in both sides.
It was like a common people at one point.
And now they've been sliced in half by this horrific catastrophic conflict, which yes, it did begin long before the SMO.
But again, the SMO did not achieve, like it didn't actually fix any of the problems that it was supposed to fix.
In fact, it accomplished everything that it was supposed to prevent, which is NATO expansion, the massive militarization of Ukraine, the formation of Ukraine to a permanent anti-Russia.
Like, it's really, really tragic what we're witnessing.
And it's shocking to me that you don't really hear a lot in so-called independent media.
Like, you never get the war, what is it good for, argument in independent media.
You only hear, like, Ukraine is stupid for fighting this war.
Like, let's like, rah-rah, you know, Russia.
But the reality is that every day this war goes on makes it much, much more difficult for Russia to achieve anything.
And the cost has already been so, so high.
If you'll allow me, though, actually, I was thinking about this, I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently because we're coming up to the, we're almost entering the fifth year of this conflict, which means that it's lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War, right?
Like, it's lasted longer than Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, ending with, you know, Soviet soldiers raising the flag over the Reichstag.
Like, that's how long this thing has been going on.
I was thinking about how insane the last four years have been.
And I was reminded of this gentleman, Alexei Mozgovoy.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
He was the leader of the Prizorok Brigade, the Ghost Brigade.
He was one of the original militias that sort of rose up against the sort of Maidan government in Donbass.
So we're talking about 2014, 2015.
And there's this amazing letter.
Actually, I think it was probably segments of a diary that was sort of compiled.
I got to read some of this to you because it touches on so many things we've spoken about today.
And so by the way, Mozgovoy was assassinated in 2015.
Very strange circumstances.
Totally different story.
But anyway, this is what Mozgovoy says.
Okay, this is a 2015.
Listen.
He says, brothers, I see how our enemies, having divided our people, are preparing a big war for us.
2015: Enemies and Culling00:14:57
And my people are not Russian or Ukrainian.
My people are one.
And I don't want to know anything else.
As a man without an arm or a leg is considered a cripple, so is a divided people.
We Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians are bequeathed to be together.
And the fact that today we are mad and hate each other is the main indictment against us.
We have violated this covenant.
What did we lack, brothers?
Soil?
Look how much land we have.
Freedom?
So by killing each other, we become more free?
I think we just don't have enough love for our brother.
We have forgotten what the sanctity of kinship is.
And therefore, strangers come to us and become masters of our house.
Now these strangers, whom we trusted more than our own people, are urging us on.
And under their sly speeches about the greatness of the Russian and Ukrainian people, we are killing each other.
He goes on to say, We, the slandered and robbed, have only a common dream of a just state.
Ukrainians dream about a great Ukraine, Russians about great Russia.
But in essence, this is one big dream of a divided people yearning for their homeland for 25 years.
We aren't yearning for a state of oligarchs and traitors, the Moscow and Kiev colonies, but for our own united Slavic state.
And it doesn't matter to me what it will be called.
Kiev and Rus', Muscovite Rus, Novorossiya.
The main thing is that it will be a new Russia, our common home.
In the meantime, we kill each other, and our executioners almost openly push us to kill.
They mock us on Russian and Ukrainian television, either insulting the Ukrainian people and calling them fascists, or insulting the Russian people, calling them occupiers.
From the objective Russian media, you will not hear words of sympathy for Ukrainians in trouble.
They will not say who plunged the whole nation into a spiritual catastrophe.
And the Russians themselves no longer hear their brothers.
They, like the Ukrainians, were lulled into patriotic lies about their own greatness and kindled petty national pride and arrogance.
The main thing that the media is busy with is preventing the awakening of good feelings between our people.
How humiliated we are, brothers, by insulting one another.
And are we so blind that we can't see the real enemies?
The war will at least open the eyes of our people to who we are and who our enemy is.
He says, don't trust, he ends with, don't trust your enemies.
Do not trust Moscow and Kiev.
Even if they give you the entire Donbass from Slovy Ansk to Mariupol, even if they give you all of Novodorosia, don't believe it.
They will turn everything into defeat.
Power in Russia and Ukraine is in the same hands.
That was in 2015.
What a prescient guy.
Right?
I can see why they had to kill him.
Yep.
He's so too much.
Yeah.
This is a guy who rose up against, you know, like the whole Maidan government, but by the end of his unfortunately short-lived life, realized that he was fighting this futile war where the Ukrainians were his brothers and they were just being pitted against each other by the global oligarchy.
Wow.
So do you have any do both sides want this forever war?
I mean, is the Putin regime trying to lose?
Yeah, you know, that's such a good question because the way that the Russian government has been behaving is truly puzzling.
Like, I'm sorry, but this idea that Russia is running circles around Ukraine just doesn't make any sense.
Like, you have to, if you look at this conflict objectively, the reality is that you were, by the way, you're absolutely correct to point out that Boris Johnson intervened in the early weeks of the war and stopped a peace deal from being signed.
And now, four years later, all we see is mindless slaughter.
What's very puzzling, though, is that instead of like, I think that by April 2022, Putin had two options, two good, like only logical options, was to either mobilize Russian society and end the war as soon as possible, or withdraw.
Because he chose like the worst possible option, which is just to sort of let it continue, and it just sort of drags on with nothing really being accomplished.
And there is no, like, Russia is now relying on a completely contract army, which doesn't make any sense if this is a real existential threat.
Like, it doesn't, there just doesn't seem to be any connect between the reality of what's occurring and Russia's own policy towards the conflict and how to resolve it correctly.
I mean, decisively.
On paper, the Russian military dwarfs Ukraine.
Okay, so it's Ukraine plus NATO and all the West.
the west but theoretically the russians should be they should have wrapped this one up ages ago shouldn't they Yeah, yes, yes.
Like, I'm sorry, but this whole, you know, this meme of like the war, the, you know, the war of attrition, actually, there's now this new term that the so-called alt media is using, which is the snail offensive technique.
That's supposed to be a flattering term, whereby Russia is just slowly and surgically inching forward as it mows down hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians while incurring almost no losses.
Like, that's the new narrative.
I'm sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense.
If you understand the objectives of the SMO, the stated objectives from the Kremlin, the longer this war goes on, the more difficult it is to accomplish anything.
The longer the war goes on, the more time NATO has to establish, to firmly take control of Ukraine, the more likely it is that Ukrainians will never forgive Russians for what has happened.
Like, every single time an artillery shell lands on a Ukrainian town or city, do you think that that's going to make it easier to create a neutral, friendly Ukraine?
Like, do people realize that when they gloat over how Ukraine has no electricity, that doesn't make like there's going to be a post-war reality.
And do you realize how much Ukrainians are going to hate Russia after this?
Like, that, like, people don't understand what they're even supporting anymore, you know?
So you mentioned slightly ironically, but with a degree of truth, the satanic NATO forces.
It seems to me that at the highest levels, the people who are kind of keeping this conflict going actually want to see Christian men from both sides being slaughtered in a kind of satanic blood sacrifice.
I mean, you can absolutely put it that way.
And I don't think I could disagree.
Like, I mean, you could even be more general, which is just they, like, there's, it's obvious that a culling, a Slavic calling is occurring in Ukraine.
And no one wants to, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to flip the switch off.
You know, like, another thing that actually blows my mind is that I have to bring this up every time I talk to anyone on a podcast or anything because it's still, like, it literally melts my brain that every day now, NATO, munitions supplied by NATO or funded by NATO land on Russian territory, like not even disputed Russian territory, like Belgorod, for example, killing Russians, destroying infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera.
And the Russian government's response is just to put their thumb up their ass and like do nothing.
It just would have never occurred to me that that's even a possibility 10 years ago.
And now it's just normal.
It's like reading the weather report.
And how did we get here?
Like, how did that become normal?
And why is it that instead of seeing like Zelensky and his entire cabinet being blown to the moon, you have guys like Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin's lead negotiator, calling Trump daddy on Twitter, like unironically.
Yeah.
I was hoping you'd be able to help me make sense of it, but actually I'm totally like it honestly, like, I can't tell you how, I mean, it's puzzling.
It's scary.
Like, it's scary that something so insane can become normal.
And I thought that I had seen everything after COVID.
Like, this whole, you know, this whole idea of normalization, you know, and returning to the new normal.
Like, I really thought that I had seen it all.
But this idea that now that this state of affairs is totally normal, it's shocking.
It's shocking.
What I found even worse, actually, and that is pretty shocking, is that we've got political leaders like Kim Starmer, who apparently is currently the British Prime Minister.
And you've got all the Germans seem to be particularly into this idea as well.
That they want to kind of commit boots on the ground.
They want to bring in the rest of the West to come and fight this glorious, virtuous slaughter.
How they've managed to sell it to anyone?
We've got houses.
I mean, I drive through the village near me.
There's a blue and yellow flag on the wall of one of the sandstone houses that's been there since certainly the last five years.
There's a Ukrainian flag which flutters where I go riding and frightening the horses.
And they were fluttering from a lot of church spires at one stage.
And I'm thinking, how blinkered do they consider the British populace to be?
That they can just sort of psych us into this World War III for this kill zone.
I mean, it seems to exist only to kill people on either side.
Yeah, it's shocking.
I mean, look, and by the way, I just want to make it, I mean, hopefully it's clear, but, you know, my own criticism of how Russia has handled this war does not negate the fact that obviously the West is at least as guilty as just pumping this conflict full of weapons for no nothing positive is being accomplished.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with democracy or freedom.
Again, that's all just marketing for the paroles.
And it's scary.
Like, it's scary how you see how, just like Molzkovo was talking, like, both sides are just blind to the fact that people are just being called when our real enemies are the ones who are pushing us into the kill zone, you know?
Yeah.
And yeah.
Do you think there's anything in it?
One of my take-homes from my trip to Russia was that I think only about 3% of the Russian population are regular church goers.
But I did get the sense that I was in the heartland of Christianity, that Mother Russia is sort of the last guardian of Christianity.
Do you think there's anything in the idea that this is why they, the powers that be, want to want to slaughter Slavs?
You know, I think that there's an argument to be made for it.
Yeah, like I'm sure that there are many, many levels to this conflict.
And, you know, you've even mentioned, you know, I'm sure that there are like occult reasons for what we are witnessing.
And, you know, obviously, whether you want to call it Christianity or whatever, obviously there's going to be a spiritual element to this.
Like, there's something, I mean, just the idea that you could push people, like that we're witnessing an orgy of violence, which in itself is like some sort of weird, you know, like ceremony.
You know, we're witnessing something scary, like not of this world.
Yeah, like Russia, I think, and with as sort of a bedrock of Christianity, look, there's a lot of great things you can say about it.
You know, I'm an Episcopalian.
I don't know if you're familiar with Episcopalians.
They're like the American Anglicans.
I was raised Episcopalian and I was later baptized in the Orthodox Church.
I'm not practicing at the moment, to be honest, but like I totally get it.
Like, I think that you go into an Orthodox church in Russia and it's an incredible experience.
Like you said, I mean, the music is honestly like angelic.
It's incredible.
Like, it's like a real, I mean, even if you're not religious, it's an experience just to be there and witness these liturgies.
But, you know, just like a Tolstoy novel, Russia is full of contradictions.
So you do have this sort of deep-seated feeling of spirituality that seems foreign in the West, but you also have one of the world's highest divorce rates.
You know, like it's, there's this, it's Russia.
It's a very messy place.
And that's what I would tell anyone.
It's like, you can't, you got to take the good with the bad, and you got to be realistic about Russia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you, you, you, you, well, obviously you're among the, you fit into the awake category.
I mean, it's quite difficult to find an acceptable term that describes those of us who are skeptical about the official narrative.
But I suppose awake will do.
Were you always that way?
Did you always, or did you once believe in the system?
Well, you know, like anyone, you so, you know, one of my biggest things, I really don't write about it enough, but actually it's my real passion, which is I think that maybe the world's biggest conspiracy is government education.
And I'm convinced that if we could just stop, you know, if we could stop schooling our children, like that's, that's the solution to everything because you're basically from the moment you're born, you're basically programmed to think a certain way.
And I think honestly, what you really just needed is a revolution of the mind.
Government Education's Role00:03:59
And then everything is very, very simple, actually.
So yeah, you know, like I grew up in Southern California and then I moved to Massachusetts, which is even more retardedly liberal than California.
And so, you know, obviously, like, growing up in that sort of environment, you are told like there are acceptable ways of viewing the world.
There are acceptable politicians they used to support.
You know, there was a time, there was a time when I was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
I mean, it's embarrassing to say, but, you know, like I fell for the psyop.
Like, I thought that Bernie Sanders was going to fight the Clinton machine.
I mean, looking back on it, I just feel silly.
But I think that everyone, you just have to go through this process of examining your beliefs and saying, well, okay, I believe this, but does it actually make any sense?
And you just sort of keep going wherever it takes you, right?
And so, no, I mean, like anyone, I was told to think a certain way and told that by thinking this way, I was a good person.
And then the more, but then you sort of realize like, this is rubbish.
I can't believe this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I used to sort of call myself a sort of South Park conservative or a sort of libertarian conservative.
And I thought, if only everyone read von Mises and Hayek, it would all be sorted out.
And all we needed was a kind of a proper conservative administration in power that understood this.
And once it would all be over.
And you don't realize you're just being played.
There was an old university friend of mine who became prime minister.
I used to smoke weed with him in my set in Christchurch.
And I thought, well, maybe Dave is the guy.
Yeah, God.
I smoked drugs with him and he seemed a pretty sound conservative when I was smoking drugs with him.
And then he gets in power and he does all these kind of really lame ass things that you associate with the left.
And you realize, no, this is not accidental.
They're all do the same thing because they're not in control.
They just, they're following orders from above.
That's so funny you bring that up because I'm not going to name him, but actually I went to college with a guy who was very, very like, I would say very chill.
It was obvious that he wanted to go into politics, but he seemed like a very decent fellow.
And he actually now is a U.S. Congressman.
He's in Congress.
And, you know, I checked on his voting record recently and he like voted for weapons for Israel and like just doing all the things that no normal human would ever do.
But it's like once you get into power, you do what you're supposed to do, or I don't know, like, who knows what happens.
So, yeah, it's like, yeah.
Yeah, well, I think your wife gets murdered in Congress.
I think that's the deal.
That's what they do.
And anyway, you're so bound up by the kind of the compromat they've got on you because of the child sex party you attended where you took a cheeky line of adrenochrome.
And I mean, it's just like, I mean, that's that's literally what they do.
Like, it's incredible.
Like, you know, actually, being back in the United States, it's so funny, James.
Like, because, you know, I mean, my mother, for example, is, I mean, cardigold, but is very sort of, she's a sort of CNN liberal.
And so we were watching, you know, the news reports about the Epstein files and stuff.
And she's like, oh, I can't believe that, you know, like Trump is involved in all this and is withholding the Epstein files.
And I was like, well, yeah, but you realize that when these Epstein files do, if they ever do come out, they're going to be just as bad for the Clintons as they are for Trump.
But you worship the Clintons and you hate Trump, but it's like they're all sex criminals.
Gangs Would Worship00:10:37
That's it.
Have you come across Peter Duke?
No.
He's great.
I've just done a podcast with him.
He's got this great sub-state.
He's been around the block.
He's a very, very smart cookie.
And he's worked in industries like Hollywood.
So he's been inside the belly of the beast.
And he's constructed this quite plausible theory on how the world is run, the structure, the command structure.
So at the bottom, you've got the sort of the lump and masses who are living in Plato's cave.
Right.
And they're just entranced by all the projections on the wall of the cave.
And that's where most people are.
And then you've got the next level up who are, I can't remember whether you, does he call them true believers or something?
The people who are committed activists or they like they're conservatives.
They're marga conservatives or they're and they believe that the political system can affect the change that they want if only that they commit themselves to the cause with enough passion.
They believe in it and how it works.
And then above that, you've got the assets.
And the assets would be, I suppose I would have been an asset.
I was a successful mainstream media commentator for the right.
I was putting forward the right, the right, the contentious right-wing view.
And I was living in a society of destroyed by liberalism.
And if only my forthright viewers were listened to more, then eventually, we would take the citadel.
And then on the level above that are the handlers.
And the handlers are the people who kind of, well, steer the assets in the right direction.
The assets, sorry, the handlers, the assets don't necessarily know their compromise.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
The handlers are definitely part of the system.
They know exactly what they're doing.
And then above that, you've got the upper tiers.
But, well, it's a good theory anyway.
I mean, I think it does explain how the world works.
I mean I don't think there's any way – and again like I – it's always hard because I don't like to – I'm trying more and more not to generalize and be as specific as possible.
But I think there's no getting around the fact that once you reach a certain level of authority or responsibility or power, you don't get there unless they have something on you.
Like, You might not be reading from a script, but the only reason you're there is because if you do something that they don't like, they have ways of dealing with that.
I just don't think that there's any way to deny that at this point.
You can't really buy your piece of freedom.
Talking to I.M. Burlingham the other day.
I don't know whether you've come across him.
He comes from one of the sort of the well, I don't know about Illuminati, but sort of bloodline families.
The kind of family that can afford to have a family office.
And he says that when you get to the level of wealth where you've got a family office, you're very constrained as to what you can do and what you can't do.
And you couldn't suddenly decide to go off piste and say, I imagine if you have a family office, you couldn't sort of set up an organization exposing the global conspiracy, for example.
So you can have loads and loads of money, but still you're not free.
You've got to work within the constraints of this wicked system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what, so you, you grew up in Southern California, but I can't remember what I, what I heard about you.
I mean, you're quite affluent background?
Like upper middle class, I would say.
I mean, my father was, he worked actually in Hollywood as an independent cinematographer and producer.
He had his own production company.
And then we moved east when I was 10 or 11.
Yeah, so and then basically the moment I got out of college, I went to Washington, D.C. to, you know, pursue my illustrious career as a political journalist and commentator.
And within a year, I was like so cynical and jaded and burnt out.
And I'm like, I never want to do, I never want to type another word of my life.
I'm so sick of everything.
And, you know, it didn't really work out that way.
I suppose I'm always interested in where people are coming from and what their journey has been.
I mean, you're familiar with Rurik Skywalker.
Indeed.
His pseudonym anyway.
I can't remember what his real name is.
But I mean, he's very forthright on Russia.
But in fact, he makes you look positively restrained.
But I have trouble.
I don't want to go, yeah, Rurick, you're so right about everything.
He's a pagan.
I mean, he doesn't even believe in God and stuff.
Does he?
I think he does, but maybe just not in the Christian idea of it.
Yeah.
You know, look, I'm not, you know, yeah.
It's, you know, for me, this might sound like a cop-out, but it's really not.
Like, I've sort of backed away from the whole religious debate in general.
I absolutely think that it's an important part of what's going on, like, at a spiritual level.
There's obviously weird, scary forces, you know, in play.
For me, though, like, I don't know, increasingly I found myself like, I don't really care what you believe, like, as long as you're not trying to aggressively, like, cattle tag me and murder my family.
You know, like, I don't know, like, I'm looking just for like anyone who I can just grow out with at this point, you know, like and grow potatoes with.
I'm not going to lie.
So I've become very non-ideological.
I'm very much with you on the potato growing.
Yeah.
But, but I bring these things up not because I'm a kind of fanatical evangelical or anything like that.
It's just that there comes a point, actually probably quite early on in one's journey down the rabbit hole, where you start asking yourself who runs the world and what's their motivation.
Those are the two quick questions.
What's the plan?
Why are they doing this?
And you can't spend as long as I have.
I mean, five years.
I've been on the intense PhD course in rabbit hoology.
And I spend a lot of time looking.
I mean, I don't.
Once you go there, you don't want to go anywhere else, do you?
And I've started sort of drawing up my big picture theory about who they are and how it works.
And it just seems to me that if you exclude the supernatural, you're missing out one of the most important elements.
This is a spiritual war between good and evil being played out on earth.
And once you decide that, and I think it's not an unreasonable conclusion, you then go, well, okay, these people, how do they fit into this schemata?
The people who run the world.
And I liked what you said about the different drugs gangs.
Because I think that's very true.
I sometimes use the analogy of the mafia.
You've got different families, and then you've got the capo di tutti capi, who's probably Satan, I mean, in my book.
But, or a different, some of the gangs would be, one of the gangs would be the Jews.
One of the gangs would be the Freemasons.
One of them would be the Jesuits.
And they're all in on it.
But I think that what unites all these different gangs is that ultimately their fealty is to Lucifer.
wouldn't go there?
I would just, like, I don't think I'm at the point where I can, like, pinpoint what the, They're obviously worshiping something, right?
I think that you're absolutely asking the right questions.
is the ultimate goal here right like you do have like for example I've never really understood the whole okay like I get it There are, like, I don't think there's any denying, for example, that there are very, very powerful Jewish bankers who are extremely Zionist and have this idea of creating the rebuilding the Temple of Solomon or whatever.
And so what, what, like, but why, though, right?
And so I guess your answer would be because they worship Lucifer.
Because the devil wants it.
Yeah.
Because the devil wants it.
So that's your answer.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I think that that makes sense.
Like, I don't know.
I'm not, I just just, like, it's just so bizarre.
The whole thing is just so mind-blowing.
You find me a better explanation, Riley.
Fair enough.
I challenge you.
You won't.
There isn't one.
Because you said, who do these guys follow?
I was going to say, well, it ain't the God of love, is it?
Oh, no.
Okay, yeah.
So I think that like fruits.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, we know what they don't, you know, we obviously know what they don't worship.
So, yeah, it's, man, like, what is really behind it all?
Whether it's whether they're worshiping a deity or they've just been corrupted by generations of, you know, on basically endless power and wealth.
And I mean, who knows?
But you seem to be very certain that it's Lucifer worship, basically.
Curb Stomp Appeal00:12:59
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it is.
I mean, some people, people who are interested in systems have come up with some very good analyses, which sort of suggests that the system is so entrenched now, it doesn't matter about who the individual players are.
The system is sort of self-replicating and self-reinforcing, and that we get more and more constrained.
But I think that just argues for a kind of diabolical intelligence that created this system.
It's always very witty.
I was going to ask you about your exit from Russia.
You were booted out.
Well, technically, no.
Technically, no.
I should be careful.
We should be careful with our words.
And so I wasn't booted out, but I sort of felt like I got a message that said I was no longer welcome there.
And so I decided to make my exit while I still had the opportunity to do so.
I mean, basically, what happened was that I, me, my son, and my partner, we're all American citizens.
My son is half Russian, so he has a Russian and U.S. passport.
We went to the United States for my son's birthday.
We flew back to Russia.
I flew with my son.
My partner flew separately.
And when she arrived in Moscow, she was detained and questioned for several hours at the airport after several hours of interrogation where they went through her phone and asked her questions, you know, about like me and her views on things.
They ultimately said, okay, you're free to go.
They actually stamped her passport saying, yes, you've been granted entry to Russia.
She was just told to wait outside, kept waiting, kept waiting.
Hours went by.
A guy comes out and says, actually, we're deporting you.
Actually, he doesn't even say that.
He just escorts her to a holding cell.
The stamp had been annulled in her passport.
She wasn't told why she was being deported.
We later found out through we hired a lawyer to get to the bottom of all this that it was for national security reasons, but the FSB won't explain why it's for national security reasons.
And so, yeah, I mean, look, it would be great if they could just be more forthcoming about why they did this, but I think all the evidence points to the fact that they basically penalized her for her relationship with me.
And instead of going just after me, which would be at least the honorable thing to do, they chose the coward's path.
And it's really, really sad because my partner had lived her basically her entire adult life in Russia.
She's an American who speaks the most beautiful Russian you've ever heard in your life.
She worked as a professional translator.
She worked as a freelancer for the Hamitage Museum.
She was months before this happened, she was on Russian state television doing a talk show or a quiz show in Russian, of course, where she competed with other foreign nationals living in Russia and answering questions about Russian culture and history and absolutely dominated, like absolutely blew all the competition out of the water.
You know, she loved this country so much.
She has a daughter who's also half Russian and has a Russian passport.
And she was basically just kicked out of the country, even though she's never had a hateful or hurtful idea in her mind.
She loved Russia.
She loved Russia much more than I did.
I was always complaining about it.
That's so sad.
Yeah, it really is.
It really is sad.
And, you know, it's like right now we're in this process.
We're trying to appeal.
She got a 25-year ban, a 25-year ban.
Yeah, and so we're trying to appeal it through this Russian lawyer, you know, in Russia.
And he's telling us, he's told us that as he's going through this appeal process, he's been pressured by authorities to drop the case.
That he's literally being intimidated not to pursue this appeal.
interesting that you're considered to be such a threat I mean I that that's what's so puzzling about it because I like you just a grouchy guy on on sub stack like Yeah, I'm just a grouch on Substack.
Like, you could just ignore me.
My audience is 98% Westerners.
It doesn't matter what I think.
And really all it did was deprive me the opportunity of sharing my stories and experiences in Russia, which I thought were beautiful things to share with the world.
I would write regularly about my life in this little Russian village where I was living and trying to make it as basically a brainless farmer who had no idea what he was doing.
But it was a wonderful experience.
It was a privilege to live in this village.
I miss it dearly.
I just wish it could have lasted longer.
They haven't really accomplished anything.
All they do is look silly and petty.
And they took away a voice who could have given like a presented a more human side to Russia.
I don't know why they did it.
Yeah.
Well, have you got any theories?
I guess they just are bitter.
I don't know.
Like, I don't know.
Maybe there's some other technical reason they decided to do this.
All they have to do is just be forthcoming and honest.
Like, just tell us.
Like, just give us a reason.
Give us a reason.
It doesn't have to be the true reason.
Just like explain something.
They won't even do that.
And all they've been trying to do is stonewall any attempt to find out or to appeal it or just get some clarity.
Yeah.
In the days when I used to go to America, and I totally believed in the West and I believed all the narratives and stuff.
But even in my most pro-American period, I recognized that there was a quality in America where it was a great place to be until you fell foul of the system when you would suddenly be absolutely shafted.
They could do anything to you.
And it was ruthless and brutal.
And I think that America and Russia have that in common.
I mean, Russia is sort of perhaps more stolid about it, and the old-fashioned America sort of pretends that it's...
Right.
But this is the same problem, isn't it?
I mean...
And also in my own country now.
I mean, I was very, very lucky not to be detained at the airport and questioned for five hours under anti-terrorism legislation, which happens to a lot of people who go to Russia these days.
And why?
I mean, what I was doing was just going and hanging out with some monks.
And say, aren't the food markets great?
Right.
No, it's absurd.
I mean, I totally agree.
And in fact, it's funny because I really do believe that Russia and the United States share so much in common.
And like you pointed out, one of them is like this, man, when you get on the wrong side of things, it's just endless pain.
Like, the curb stomping is relentless.
And, yeah, like, I mean, the thing about...
What's curb stomping?
Oh, so like, so a curb?
Like, you have a different word in British English, don't you?
Like, the curb.
Oh, yeah.
You have a curb.
Yeah, yeah.
You have pavement and then the curb.
The curb stomp is like to put someone's head on the curb and just stomp it.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, curb stomp.
Yes.
Yeah.
Sorry for being so graphic.
No, but that's we are all living in tyrannies.
And the difference is that the Russians know it.
The Russian people know it.
They do know it.
Whereas somebody...
I go around and talk to people about this stuff.
I mention it to my wife, and she'll think I'm just an absolute nutcase.
How can you think that?
This is England.
This is great.
Yeah.
It's the same in the United States.
I mean, I've never been in a more over-educated, idiotic country.
You know, like people are, you have all these people with like master's degrees from Harvard who think it's great that you can be interrogated endlessly, you know, in some like gitmo type camp.
They think it's like all for freedom, you know?
It's just scary.
It's really scary.
Like, it's scary living amongst people who were that's normal.
And it gets worse with each generation.
I was in the sauna last night, and it was an unusually crowded sauna.
And there was a woman there, I'd say, sort of the generation below mine.
And we were talking about skiing.
And I was saying I hadn't been skiing in so long that in my day, everyone used to ski without just wearing woolly hats.
Nobody wore a crash helmet.
And apparently, now I gather, everyone wears a crash hat.
And if you don't wear a crash hat, you get really strange looks.
And I said, I have a real problem with this.
Nobody died, or hardly anyone died.
Schumacher hadn't.
But wasn't he wearing a helmet?
I forget.
But I don't like the idea that there are helmet Nazis patrolling every slope.
And I said it's like the Stasi.
It's like the lives of others.
That movie, I don't know whether you went to the other side.
I love that film.
That's a great film.
Yeah.
And I said, I don't mind so much people in the actual Stasi.
But what I resent is the way that the whole of the citizenry has been mobilized in support of this.
So those people sort of giving you funny looks if you're not wearing a crash helmet.
And she said, yes, but on the other hand, traumatic head injuries and also people might feel uncomfortable and blah, blah, blah.
I said, you know the problem with you?
You've never grown up in a world where you were free.
Your generation doesn't know what freedom looks like.
I remember a period where we could do pretty much what we liked.
And your generation does not know that world.
And the next generation is going to know even less what it's like.
I think that people don't realize that real freedom comes with certain dangers, I guess you could put it, or possible hazards.
And now we've turned towards safetyism and convenience.
And yeah, I mean, our very conception of freedom, you know, at this point, I'm sure it's very similar in the UK.
It's like, you know, freedom is now where you get to choose between a selection of pre-curated options, you know.
And then the best thing, too, of course, that the way that you show that you're free is that once you've chosen your choice, which has already been pre-selected, you're supposed to argue with people who chose the different choice.
And that's how you show that you're living in a vibrant democracy.
You know, everyone's arguing over, I chose this thing that was already pre-selected.
I chose this one.
And then you grab each other by the neck and defriend each other on Facebook.
And that's how you show that you live in a vibrant, free democracy.
Yeah.
That's why they get it.
Did you ever hear about this thing we had called Brexit?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Yeah, we were given this, and it lasted, they dragged it on for years.
It was like, and it turned into the English Civil War where families were divided, brothers were divided from brothers and uncles from.
It was, it was, and there are still people who will freeze me out because I chose the wrong side in the Civil War.
And the net result was nothing.
Nothing changes.
Everything got worse.
That was right.
So you had the legacy bitterness, but no.
It's like the SMO.
You're like, nothing has been gained.
Just ruining friendships and families.
yeah yeah I did that I I went to buy some some groceries today in the supermarket and the woman was lamenting the fact that they were I mean I'm surrounded by beautiful countryside good hunt country And with these remote villages and stuff, but I saw one of the most remote idyllic villages is about to have a housing development.
and there isn't there is no reason that place does not it needs a housing development likely it needs a hole in the head There is no reason for it.
The people who live in that housing development are going to have no affection for the area, no sympathy, no understanding of what makes the countryside so special.
It's just a dormitory for the cities.
That's all it's going to be.
And they're not good.
They're not going to get far out.
What happened with, am I wrong in thinking that like architecture has been completely corrupted to the point where it's, it's literally like a war against like us as people.
Architecture's War Against Beauty00:03:26
Totally.
But that's been happening since, well, you think about when brutalism came in.
When was that?
That was like the 40s.
I suppose it was.
And Le Corbusier was, yeah, he was earlier, wasn't he?
But I mean, is there not a single architect in the world who has any shame?
You know, like, what happened?
Because it's such a beautiful art form, and somehow we just destroyed it within a generation.
But it goes to my point that I was having with the conversation with this woman in the shop.
I said, what you have to understand is that this is all deliberate.
Yeah.
They want to crush us.
Want to make us miserable.
In fact I was gonna, I was trying to, I think Jacob Jacob Nordengard, I think yeah written, written about this um, and he describes the moment when, whoever it was, entered um Constantinople and they saw the the, the eastern the, the eastern uh,
Christian Empire at its, at its zenith, and And they were so overwhelmed by the beauty that they wept.
We are meant to seek beauty.
Beauty lifts the soul.
Yes.
And the people building these things.
In fact, my son had just been in Paris and he'd been to the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
And he sent a photograph back of Oscar Wilde's tomb.
And you kind of think, I mean, Oscar Wilde was probably an asset, wasn't he?
I should think.
I mean, he had an agenda, to push.
How good a playwright was he really?
I think he was probably a bit shit.
He came up with his aphorisms.
But then, I mean, so did allegedly Albert Einstein and Mark Twain, and they were assets as well.
I don't believe anything anymore.
if you were going to have a tomb for oscar wilde yeah it would be it would have to be camp and probably with lots of it would probably be fantasy extra It would probably be kind of Aubrey Beardsley-esque.
It would be art nouveau-ish.
It would be something.
And instead, it's this weird thing designed by Jacob Epstein, who was one of the kind of modernist sculptors.
And it looks just kind of totally un-Oscar Wildish.
And my wife said to me, I wonder why he designed it that way.
And I said, because it was his job.
He was a modernist sculptor.
And he had to create things that are kind of ugly.
Because uglification was his mission.
Isn't that incredible?
You're like professional uglifiers.
Like, let's just make everything terrible.
That's your job.
Because if you've read, you probably have in that weird science fiction book.
C.S. Lewis wrote a science fiction trilogy.
And the third book in the trilogy is called That Hideous Strength.
And there's a section on this where the guy who wants to progress up the ladder, he wants to join the inner circle of the people who make the decision.
Opposing Beauty00:04:08
He wants to join the cabal, basically.
And part of this process of his training process is to become this room where the symmetry is all wrong and where the eye is forced to kind of deal with these jarring.
It's the opposite of the golden mean.
It's the opposite of symmetry.
We all understand what beauty looks like.
And if you can surround beauty-loving people with ugliness, it lowers the spirits.
It weakens the power to resist.
And that's what's going on.
It's been going for years.
Oh, it's scary.
I do hope that our conversation doesn't mean that I'm going to get banned from going to Russia.
Oh, I doubt it.
I don't know.
I do love it.
I want to learn the language.
But I'm going to have to find a way of doing it that's not on Duolingo because that didn't work for me.
It's a very difficult one to tackle, but I'm sure with persistence.
With persistence, yeah.
Well, I'm very sorry for what's happened to you and your partner and your boy.
I mean, how is he coping without Russia?
You know, obviously he left a lot of things behind, but he's a young lad who likes cheese pizza.
How old is the United States?
He is eight years old.
Don't let Riley, don't let him eat American junk food all the time.
You can't.
I know.
Food is so bad.
I know.
It's actually, it's terrible.
It's terrible.
We're not planning on staying in the United States for much longer.
So we're just right now, our tentative plan is to actually go to Central Europe.
I have some friends there, and they have a nice little village outpost and garden/slash farm.
So we might hang out there for a bit until we get our bearings.
And then, I don't know.
I mean, we're still looking for something that will be a little bit more long-term, but we just really miss, you know, we miss nature.
We miss the countryside.
We miss the simplicity.
And you can find that in a lot of places.
Obviously, Russia has lots of room for that kind of living.
It does.
You can find it almost anywhere.
So, you know.
Well, good luck.
And thank you for you've been waiting a long time to come on the podcast.
I've been mean to have you sometime.
I mean, thank you so much for the invite.
It's really great to talk.
And honestly, I hope you do get back to Russia because, like I said, it's a beautiful, incredible country.
I mean, it's a lot to take in.
A lot of good, a lot of bad.
And anyone listening, try to get to Russia.
It's an experience.
Now, where can people find you?
I mean, I don't mean as in to knock on your door directly.
I mean, where can they read your job?
Yeah, I mean, I'm basically just on Substack, unfortunately.
Now that they're complying with all these crazy digital ID laws, I don't know what I'm going to do.
But yeah, I'm on Substack, edwardslawsquat.substack.com.
I'm also on Telegram, but I rarely post.
But you can find me on Telegram too.
So, yeah.
Great.
Thank you very much.
And everyone else, if you've enjoyed this, if you're the FSB, I'm sorry if I've upset you.
Please let me come back.
I do love my channel.
Honestly.
Please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This is my living.
And although Substack will do everything in its power to stop you becoming a paid subscriber, it seems to me.
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Buy me a coffee.
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Thank you for being a listener.
And thank you again, Riley Waggerman, aka Edward Stuff Squad.