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Jan. 16, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

03:08:16

BBN, Jan 16, 2024 - Trump BLOWOUT in Iowa means Democrats will be DANGEROUSLY DESPERATE...

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	Okay, when you need to transfer diesel to your space heater, this is by far the best solution.
	It's a piston pump from Fill-Right.
	This is if you don't have electricity, obviously.
	And just by pumping it, you get quite a lot of fuel transfer there.
	I'm pumping it slowly just to show you here.
	And I think 10 strokes of this does about 2 gallons, at least that's my understanding.
	And then, of course, we're just going to put this in our diesel heater here, right there.
	And then just start pumping away.
	Hey, look, there's roadie.
	How you doing, Rhodey?
	You want to help pump diesel?
	Rhodey?
	You want to be part of this?
	You could be helpful.
	Hey, Rhodey.
	What you doing?
	I think you have four legs.
	One of them could work on this piston pump, right?
	Hey, Rhodey.
	Ready?
	Bark!
	Bark!
	Yeah, that's right!
	Pumper diesel!
	Woo!
	Oh yeah!
	Good boy!
	Fun night!
	Alright!
	Good boy, Rowdy!
	Good boy!
	Good boy!
	Okay!
	Quiet!
	Quiet!
	Good boy, Rowdy!
	You are such a...
	Oh, my God.
	All right.
	Welcome to BragTown Broadcast News this Tuesday, January 16th, 2024.
	Mike Adams here, thank you for joining me.
	We've got, of course, big breaking news out of Iowa, where Trump achieved a total blowout, beating DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the globalist, and also, I guess, Vivek Ramaswamy was just a total blowout.
	I didn't even see his numbers anywhere on the voting there, so I don't know what's going on with that.
	But Trump took over 50% of the vote.
	He takes all the delegates out of Iowa.
	And it's very clear that this puts Trump on track to be the GOP nominee, which, I mean, I've been talking about this for a while.
	I thought he was going to be the nominee anyway, but tonight really cements that.
	And it is time for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis to drop out of the race.
	at this point.
	Trump is going to be the nominee and at some point here anybody that doesn't want to be ruled by Joe Biden or the Democrats Is going to have to make a choice.
	And it's increasingly clear that aside from the independent candidates, you know, RFK Jr.
	and Dr.
	Shiva, who I've interviewed a couple of times, aside from those candidates between the two major parties, Trump is the only choice at this point.
	So we'll get into that in a little more detail.
	For the interview today, I've got something special for you.
	And as you know, Gonzalo Lira passed away as a prisoner in a Ukraine prison.
	He was tortured and killed.
	He was murdered, in essence, by, well, a conspiracy between Ukraine and the United States.
	And Gonzalo Lira was a US citizen and a journalist, and he was arrested and prosecuted in Ukraine for speech crimes, for saying things that Zelensky did not like.
	And there's no freedom of the press in Ukraine.
	There's not even elections in Ukraine.
	You're not even allowed to have a press organization that counters any official narrative in Ukraine.
	You'll be arrested or assassinated if you even try that.
	And that's what happened to Gonzalo Lira.
	He was arrested and ultimately assassinated.
	I mean, killed through medical neglect in the prison system.
	Well, I interviewed Gonzalo Lira a little over a year ago.
	And I thought I would play that interview for you here today.
	Because you need to know what he was saying that they killed him for.
	And I think this interview captures that.
	It's a bit on the long side, actually.
	So I'm going to keep the rest of this a little bit shorter.
	But I want you to hear from Gonzalo Lira from September of 2022, when we were already well into the Russia-Ukraine war and what he was saying at that time that has now come true.
	I mean, I usually don't play older interviews, but in this case, Gonzalo was so far ahead.
	You'll hear that a lot of what he said has now come true.
	And you'll also realize why they killed him.
	Why they couldn't let him be free, because his speech was telling the truth at a time when truth was considered treason.
	Well, I guess it still is, actually.
	But that's the interview we're going to play for you today.
	But there are some other big stories that you need to know about.
	The nation of Qatar, or as some people pronounce it, Qatar, has paused natural gas shipments through the Red Sea.
	Which means that Europe is now going to suffer an even worse energy crisis.
	So the economic devastation across Western Europe that has been caused by, well, the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines carried out by the U.S. Navy, that was just the beginning.
	Now, Europe will get no natural gas shipments from Qatar until things settle down in the Middle East, which does not seem to be happening at all.
	And the U.S., of course, is supplying the bombs to Israel that's bombing Gaza, and the Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea in order to protest the genocide that Israel is committing against Gaza, and that's what's creating the shipping instability in this region, and this is why Qatar has said, we're not even going to ship liquid natural gas anymore.
	So, no matter what happens in the world, you notice how Europe suffers.
	Western Europe in particular.
	And by the way, it's worth pointing out, you know, the Western press is very dishonest how they're covering this.
	They're saying, you know, the Houthis are terrorists and they're threatening the peaceful waterways and they're threatening prosperity.
	Folks, the Houthis aren't doing anything that the U.S. doesn't itself do when it is enforcing economic sanctions against nations that it doesn't like, even when the U.S. makes up those sanctions itself.
	So the U.S. can at any time, any day, just say, well, we're sanctioning Iran, for example.
	And then the U.S. can just start...
	You know, bombing Iranian ships or ports or seizing Iranian vessels, which is what they did before.
	And the Western press never says, oh, that's a threat to peace and prosperity and freedom waterways.
	No, the media would cheer the US military for doing that.
	But when the Houthis do the exact same thing to enforce their sanctions, they Well, then all of a sudden the Houthis are terrorists.
	Isn't that interesting, the double standard?
	Because there have been times in the past when the U.S. declared economic sanctions against a nation for carrying out genocide.
	And then the U.S. would get involved in seas shipments and would threaten vessels or even fire rounds at sea vessels or what have you, or even sink vessels.
	The U.S. does that anytime at once.
	Well, now the Hooties are doing something similar.
	It's the same thing.
	It's just from the other side.
	So I guess we have to hope that the weather in Western Europe stays unseasonably warm. .
	Otherwise, well, energy could get very scarce very quickly.
	All right, in other news, the Houthis did fire a missile at a U.S.-owned ship.
	This is being reported by Al Jazeera.
	This is hours after a U.S. aircraft shot down a ballistic missile fired at an American destroyer in the Red Sea.
	So the Houthis are harassing U.S. military vessels now and also U.S.-owned cargo ships.
	Now, remember the economics in all of this.
	Updated information here is that the Houthis, their drones that they're using to attack typically cost about $20,000, but some of the drones are way cheaper, just a couple of thousand dollars.
	The missiles that the U.S. and the U.K. are using to intercept these drones are typically $1 million.
	And there's a very limited supply of those missiles.
	So think about it.
	The Houthis spend $20,000 to launch a drone.
	The U.S. or the U.K. spends a million dollars to shoot it down.
	Hmm.
	Asymmetric economic warfare.
	The Houthis can build all kinds of drones for $20,000 each or a couple grand each.
	They can just launch them out over the ocean, over the Red Sea, over different areas, the Arabian Sea even, and just wait for the U.S. to deplete all of its anti-air missiles, essentially.
	And then what happens?
	Then the U.S. Navy, they're sitting ducks out there.
	What do they do then?
	I guess they have to sail back home somewhere, somewhere to reload at a million dollars a missile.
	And that's probably, I don't know, a three-week turnaround or something like that to sail out of there and then reload and sail back.
	That's probably about three weeks.
	That's if everything goes well.
	And so during those three weeks, well, you know, Those naval vessels aren't there defending Israel.
	So the Houthis know exactly what they're doing.
	Or sometimes they're called the Houthis.
	I don't know.
	I've heard it pronounced both ways.
	I don't know the correct way to pronounce it.
	So I'm just calling them the Houthis.
	The Tutti Frutti Hootis.
	It's just easier to remember.
	Because it's like an ice cream flavor.
	You want Rocky Road?
	No, I'll take the Tutti Frutti Hootie.
	Ice cream cone.
	Yes.
	Now, the escalation continues in the Middle East.
	Things are getting, you know, very serious there.
	And Iran launched missiles at a U.S. consulate in Iraq.
	This is considered a major escalation from Iran.
	Let's see.
	Short-range ballistic missiles or heavy suicide drones probably launched from Iran.
	That's what is believed.
	Four people were killed, according to ABC News, but no Americans were hurt.
	And then, seemingly in response to this, Israel launched new airstrikes against Iran, targets outside Aleppo International Airport in northern Syria.
	So we have, apparently, if this holds out, we have the first...
	Iranian or Iranian missiles being launched in this conflict and targeting what's believed to be an Israeli Mossad headquarters in Iraq.
	At least that's what's reported by The Cradle.
	Or some people are saying it's a U.S. consulate.
	Maybe those are the same thing.
	Maybe the Israeli Mossad headquarters is located in the U.S. consulate building.
	Maybe this is why Iran attacked them.
	The IRGC with Iran has confirmed that they launched missiles on what they call anti-Iranian terrorist sites, which is U.S. military sites.
	They've attacked ISIS terrorist sites in Syria, and they've attacked a Mossad headquarters in Kurdistan, Iraq.
	So I guess they're saying those are three different attacks.
	I mean, look, information is kind of sketchy.
	The bottom line is there's a lot of escalation happening, and Iran is launching missiles and hitting targets.
	So you know how this goes.
	It's going to be tit for tat, right?
	It's going to be retaliation.
	Then Israel is going to bomb somebody else even bigger.
	And then the U.S. is going to say, well, we've got to bomb somebody.
	We've got to bomb Iran.
	You know, Lindsey Graham will get involved.
	And then Iran will say, well, we have to bomb you back for our dignity.
	And then Iran, which has a ton of missiles, by the way, all over the place, maybe they start attacking Israel.
	You do realize that if Iran wants to wipe out Israel, they can do so in a matter of just a few minutes.
	They've got that many missiles.
	I mean, Israel would cease to exist.
	So whatever Iran is doing right now is a very, very limited kind of precision, a calculated response to be able to tell their own people, yeah, we fought back, we launched missiles, but perhaps to try not to escalate this too much, but the West wants escalation.
	America and Israel want massive escalation.
	Well, Israel wants to rope the U.S. into this war.
	Israel wants the U.S. and Iran at each other's throats.
	I mean, that's been clear from day one.
	And things are going in that direction.
	All right.
	Now, speaking of war, from the website modernity.news, which I believe is Paul Joseph Watson's website.
	I think it is.
	We have a secret German Ministry of Defense document that lays out the path to World War III. The German military is preparing for a potential attack by Russia in February of this year, you know, coming up in a few weeks, which culminates in a wider war after the U.S. presidential election.
	So, the German newspaper Bild reports on the details of a previously classified Berlin Ministry of Defense document called Alliance Defense 2025.
	The secret strategy document...
	War Games, a hybrid Russian attack on NATO's eastern flank as soon as next month, and then lays out the steps on how the conflict would escalate month by month.
	And from the Bild newspaper, it says that tens of thousands of German soldiers would be deployed.
	Yeah, because that's all they have.
	You might as well say, 52 tanks will be deployed because that's all they have.
	And they'll all be destroyed by the Russians, too, by the way.
	Let's see.
	The scenario culminates in the deployment of hundreds of thousands of NATO troops, which means Americans, by the way, and the onset of what amounts to World War III by the summer of 2025.
	Wow.
	Okay, so here's a summary of it from this story.
	You need to pay attention because this is what Germany believes will happen.
	Now, maybe this is fear-mongering on the part of the German government.
	This might be them assigning to Russia all kinds of motivations that aren't really true.
	But this is what Germany's Ministry of Defense says.
	Quote, Russia's at first covert and then increasingly overt attacks on the West begins in July.
	I guess we're talking about July 2024.
	Cyber attacks and other forms of hybrid warfare are anticipated.
	Primarily in the Baltic states, clashes occur.
	That's pretty vague.
	Which Russia uses as an excuse to initiate large-scale military exercises on its territory and in Belarus.
	According to the scenario, the situation could escalate in October.
	I guess that's October this year, 2024.
	If Russia deploys troops and medium-range missiles to Kaliningrad, which is in the northwest section of Russia close to the border of those now NATO countries.
	From December 2024, an artificially induced border conflict and, quote, clashes with numerous casualties unfold in the vicinity of the Suwalki Gap.
	That's the Suwalki Corridor.
	I'm not familiar with that, but I'm sure we can find it on a map.
	At a moment when the United States may be without a leader for several weeks after the elections...
	I.e., when Trump is elected and chaos erupts from the left all across America, then Russia, with the support of Belarus, repeats the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, but now on NATO territory.
	Again, this is the Ministry of Defense of Germany saying this.
	In May 2025, NATO decides on containment measures.
	And then on D-Day, NATO deploys 300,000 military personnel to the eastern flank, including 30,000 soldiers from the Bundeswehr.
	That's the German military.
	Am I saying that right?
	Bundeswehr.
	Yeah, whatever.
	Now, where would NATO get 300,000 military personnel?
	Well, they're not coming from the United Kingdom.
	They don't have that many.
	They're not coming from Germany.
	They don't have that many.
	I mean, they're not coming from France.
	They're not coming from...
	Well, okay, Poland has quite a few.
	Poland has a couple hundred thousand.
	But some significant number are going to come from the United States.
	I mean, Turkey's not going to send a bunch of troops to fight against Russia.
	This is coming from the U.S. So if this scenario holds true, if Germany is correct about this...
	It means a widespread military draft in America.
	Yeah, a draft.
	Hmm, how's that going to go?
	And a draft with Trump as president.
	So how much you want to bet?
	I mean, if we have an election and Trump wins, which seems increasingly likely, Suddenly the left will become anti-war, you know, because Trump's in the White House, and then Trump, who is pro-military, and Trump absolutely supports Israel, Trump would sort of be forced to initiate a draft, and then the left would lose their minds.
	We're not going to go die in Europe.
	We're not going to die for Israel, you know, for sure.
	The left doesn't want to do that.
	So you would see anti-war protests that are really anti-Trump protests, I mean,
	antiwar, you know, libertarians, man.
	But can you imagine what a draft is going to look like in the United States in the middle of an Antifa uprising or Black Lives Matter uprising?
	You're going to see chaos erupting all across the country.
	And even if we don't have a war in Europe, just Trump becoming president will cause the left to activate every desperate civil war uprising, every terrorist sabotage act that they can dream up.
	They will try to tear this country down from the inside if Trump wins the election.
	Of course, they're trying everything to stop Trump, including removing him from the ballot in multiple states.
	And probably they're going to try to cancel the elections.
	If anything, it seems like Biden and the State Department, they need to accelerate this war with Russia before the election.
	But, you know, I'm not sure they have enough time.
	These things take longer than they would like.
	Well, this election is coming up quickly.
	I mean, the Iowa caucus has just been decided and Trump took a commanding victory there.
	So it doesn't look like the Democrats are going to be successful at stopping Trump.
	Maybe they can stop the election with enough false flags and terrorism and EMP attacks and things like that.
	But they want World War III. They want to deploy U.S. troops in Europe.
	And I have a big warning for the Pentagon.
	Oh, did you hear Lloyd Austin, or at least his body double, was released from the hospital?
	Yeah, I guess they found somebody that looks close enough and they said he's been released from the hospital, but we don't have any photos, no videos, nothing.
	So it still looks like a cover story to me.
	And that is, if NATO deploys 300,000 military personnel to the eastern flank of the NATO countries, you know, which is the western edge of Russia and Ukraine, 300,000 military personnel.
	They're going to lose at least 100,000 as casualties.
	Maybe a lot more.
	You know why?
	Because Russia has become the world's most effective fighting machine since February 22 of 2022.
	And Russia made a lot of early mistakes in the special military operation with Ukraine.
	But since then, Russia has maximized its domestic industrial output, its wartime infrastructure.
	It's producing by a factor of almost 10 to 1 more munitions than the entire NATO countries combined other than Turkey, let's say.
	But the United States, Great Britain, and so on, they can't even keep pace at all with Russia.
	Russia now has veteran troops, highly experienced, highly motivated, and Putin has very high levels of domestic support, something like 80 or 90% among his own population, which, of course, nobody in the Western countries has that at all, because all the leaders of the Western countries, Germany, the UK, the US, Canada, all these leaders are despised by their own people because these leaders are at war with their own people.
	They don't represent their people.
	It's not a democracy.
	These Western countries are authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.
	And so even if you say that Putin is a totalitarian, well, hey, the same is true with Justin Trudeau.
	The same is true with Joe Biden.
	I mean, don't pretend that we in the US, that we have a democracy and we're trying to protect democracy all around the world and we have to stop Russia in order to protect democracy.
	What a load of crap!
	The U.S. isn't a democracy.
	The U.S. is a captured totalitarian regime with rigged elections, government censorship, and they just murdered a U.S. citizen journalist, Gonzalo Lira, in Ukraine, which is supposed to be a U.S. ally.
	Give me a break.
	The U.S. doesn't stand for any human rights or civil rights or rules of law, rules of war, nothing.
	But if the U.S. goes to war in Europe, oh man, U.S. forces are going to get demolished, man.
	Just demolished.
	I mean, listen to Scott Ritter on this.
	He knows what's going on.
	And the U.S. already sent a massive amount of military equipment to Ukraine that's already been destroyed.
	Like M777s and HIMARS and Patriot missile batteries.
	A lot of that's been completely demolished by Russia and Russia's hypersonic missiles.
	And, oh yeah, the U.S. doesn't have hypersonic missiles.
	And neither does the U.K. And neither does Germany.
	And neither does Canada, of course.
	Nobody in the West has functioning hypersonic missiles or functioning anti-air defenses that are effective against hypersonic missiles.
	Russia's got better artillery, better nuclear weapons, better drones, better electronic warfare.
	Russia's got hyperglide vehicles.
	I mean, there's just no comparison.
	Russia's got the thermobaric bombs.
	That are better than the U.S. systems?
	And Russian soldiers aren't obese, living on junk food, overweight, undertrained, woke.
	No, that's the U.S. military under Lord Austin.
	Woke military versus real soldiers of Russia.
	Hmm.
	I wonder who's going to win.
	Don't fight Russia in a land war.
	This...
	There should be required reading for every military commander.
	Just don't try to beat Russia in a land war.
	It's not going to work out for you.
	So right now, if you're the Democrats and the Biden regime or the controllers, you know, Barack Obama, you're desperately trying to figure out how to cause a major crisis before Trump can be elected president.
	I mean, that's priority one for the controllers there.
	Well, the traitors.
	And it's not that difficult to see what the options are.
	I mean, probably the easiest option for them is to just cause a banking crisis, a financial collapse, debt collapse, dollar collapse, I don't know, some form of that.
	And then claim we've been attacked by Russian currency hackers or something.
	And they're working with Trump, for God's sake.
	Look.
	And then they have to cancel the election and everybody loses all their bank accounts and then there's riots and then there's national emergency and martial law.
	Well, we can't have elections in the middle of a crisis, you know?
	That kind of thing.
	That's one scenario.
	Another scenario is to start World War III before the election by trying to nuke Russia, for example, or setting off a nuke in America and blaming Russia.
	You know, either one of those scenarios.
	Or Having the U.S. nuke a major European city and blaming Russia.
	I mean, the U.S. has destroyed Germany's economy with the Nord Stream pipeline destruction.
	Why wouldn't the U.S. just nuke a German city and say Russia did it?
	The U.S. probably has Russian nuclear material loaded onto a missile for precisely that kind of operation or loaded into a van, you know, in a crate.
	Just a Russian-made nuke.
	You know, it's material acquired from the Uranium One deal involving Hillary Clinton, and I think John McCain was part of that, and a bunch of traitors.
	Yeah, they got nuclear material from Russia, and so when they set off the bomb, the isotopes will indicate that it's a Russian nuke, and then they can blame Russia, and then they can have World War III, and then they can cancel the election, keep Trump out of power, and have their war, all at the same time.
	I have no doubt that's what they're trying to do.
	So keep all this in mind when you consider your preparedness activities.
	I have to reiterate, don't trust on-grid money or money in the banking system.
	I don't trust the banks at all.
	And I've continued to off-grid my own personal assets as much as possible to have the least amount of exposure in the banking system.
	And you know what I've talked about, gold, silver, goldbacks.
	Private crypto, land, ammunition, diesel fuel.
	Boy, I sure am glad I have a lot of diesel fuel right now.
	I'm burning diesel in this crazy cold blast here in Texas.
	That video I showed right at the very beginning, that's my little diesel pump set up.
	I put diesel into these 55-gallon drums, and then I position those drums near my diesel forced-air heater that I showed you the other day, and then I use the fill-right transfer pump.
	They're manual.
	But they move a lot of fuel, and they're not that hard to pump.
	Actually, the piston pump works better than the rotary pump, by the way.
	If you want a really reliable diesel fuel transfer system, Just search for Phil-Rite.
	That's the word Phil hyphen R-I-T-E. You probably wouldn't guess that, but it's Phil hyphen R-I-T-E, Phil-Rite.
	And get the piston transfer pump that you pump up and down.
	It's way more efficient and it's easier to use.
	It really works well.
	And yeah, it's made in America.
	It's a few hundred dollars.
	No, they're not a sponsor.
	Their stuff just works.
	And it works even when it's freezing cold or way below freezing.
	So I'm just glad I have a lot of diesel because I'm burning some diesel right now, let me tell you.
	And that's, you know, worth gold.
	When you're freezing and you need heat, you know, diesel has a function.
	For off-grid money, be sure to check out verifiedgoldbacks.com.
	Goldbacks have real physical 24 karat gold embedded in the polymers of the bills, and it's very divisible, high utility.
	You can have one one-thousandth of an ounce of gold, that's the one goldback, or you can have fives, tens, twenty-fives, and fifties.
	And I did all the laboratory testing on those, confirmed what they have, the mass and the purity.
	And set up that affiliate site, verifiedgoldbacks.com, where we earn a small percentage on them at no additional cost to you.
	You can get goldbacks, which are beautiful.
	Just check out that website.
	And people love these.
	It's one more way to have high utility gold stored yourself that's instantly divisible.
	And is instantly usable even when the grid goes down.
	So I think it's great to have privacy crypto for when the grid works and you need to transfer funds very quickly.
	You need portability.
	That's what crypto is for.
	And you don't have to carry crypto with you.
	You know, you can just memorize a seed phrase and you can have it in your head.
	But for grid down scenarios like, you know, war, World War III, post-nuclear war, you want things that are also self-custody physical things.
	Like gold coins, silver coins, gold backs, like I mentioned, or ammunition, or diesel fuel that I'm using right now.
	I mean, you don't have to use diesel in a tractor all the time.
	Sometimes you're just burning it for heat.
	And I'm amazed, by the way, how clean the diesel burning is.
	It doesn't smell like diesel exhaust in my barn where I'm using it.
	It doesn't smell like that at all.
	But it's preventing everything in the barn from freezing, including the animals.
	So I have a lot of happy animals in there, including the new rooster hen pair that I adopted.
	They're hanging out in there.
	I got the turbo jet engine diesel heater going with the battery back up.
	That's the EcoFlow from BeReady123.com.
	They are a sponsor, by the way.
	They have the battery backup systems that work great.
	BeReady123.com if you want to check them out.
	Yeah, I might as well just mention a couple sponsors here.
	You can get really nice high-end folding firearms from ShieldArms.com and also steel magazines for your favorite Glocks, including the Glock 43X, which is what I carry now.
	I really love the companies that are sponsors of what we do because they're all practical preparedness solutions that will help keep people alive in whatever kind of scenario is coming.
	But it's clear World War III is coming.
	It's clear that the Democrats are going to do everything they can to stop the upcoming election.
	In fact, the stronger Trump gets, let's talk about Trump for a minute, the stronger Trump gets in the polls, not just the polls but the caucus votes, the crazier the Democrats are going to get.
	And you're already seeing the New York Times and other left-wing media outlets talk about how Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.
	What democracy are you talking about, you morons?
	You don't even support democracy.
	You support censorship and rigging elections and tyranny and bombing people all over the world.
	You don't support democracy.
	The leaders of America do not represent the people one bit.
	Same thing in Canada, same thing in Australia, same thing in New Zealand.
	You get the idea.
	But they're going to go crazy to stop Trump.
	So you watch.
	Trump gets stronger.
	Democrats get crazier.
	And I predict they're going to replace Joe Biden.
	They're going to replace him with some candidate that they think can be like a nearly last minute switcheroo to salvage their vote, which they can only win by cheating anyway.
	So Trump has to win beyond the margin of cheating in order to make it in.
	And that's going to be the hard part.
	But the Democrats are going to throw Biden under the bus.
	He won't even know what happened.
	He's like, what am I doing under a bus?
	I thought I was giving a speech.
	Now I'm under a bus.
	Did I trip?
	Did I fall here?
	And then they're going to roll out.
	I mean, I don't know.
	Who do you think it's going to be?
	Michael Obama?
	Gruesome Newsome?
	Oprah?
	Buttigieg?
	Maybe Nikki Haley will run as a Democrat, because she pretty much is.
	She'll probably switch parties and run as a Democrat, yeah.
	And can we just say, can we all send a message to Ron DeSantis?
	Like, we love you, Ron, as the governor of Florida.
	Just please keep doing that.
	It's time to just bow out of the race, stop attacking Trump, and Trump's the guy.
	Nikki Haley was always an embarrassment.
	She was always a globalist.
	She's just a female John McCain.
	Never forget.
	Never had a chance.
	I mean, the people are way more informed now than ever before.
	This isn't the 1990s, where you can just pull the wool over everybody's eyes and, you know, end up with a Well, Bush Senior from 88, but you're not going to be able to do that anymore.
	People are way more sophisticated, more informed, more connected with alternative media now.
	At this point, it's Trump all the way for the GOP side.
	Hey, there's one more thing I want to show you here.
	This video out of Germany.
	The German farmers are protesting like crazy.
	Check out this video.
	I'll talk over it while you're watching.
	From RT.com, thousands of tractors flood Berlin's streets in massive farmer protests.
	More than 8,500 people and some 6,000 vehicles participated in a major rally in the German capital, police said.
	Thousands of tractors clogged the streets of Berlin as German farmers staged a rally to protest against agricultural policy changes planned by Chancellor Olaf Scholz's cabinet.
	The government had earlier announced a reduction of tax breaks for the sector, you know, for farmers, like reducing basically the subsidies on fuel, as well as plans to slash diesel subsidies.
	Oh, well, they just said that.
	Okay, photos and videos published on social media showed hundreds of pieces of agricultural equipment moving through Berlin's streets in tight columns.
	So what is that?
	It's a combine.
	What is that?
	It's a baler.
	Huh.
	Or standing at the side of the roads, farmers move through the city with flashing lights and sirens on.
	Go farmers!
	Some vehicles displayed banners and placards reading, Break the Green Wave!
	Stop the Traffic Light Coalition!
	Referring to the term commonly used to describe Germany's current government, made up of Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and the Greens, i.e.
	libtards.
	Other vehicles display slogans like, no farmers, no food, no future.
	And I'm sure, you know, all the WEF globalists where they're reading those signs and saying, yes, and yes, and yes, that's exactly what we planned.
	No farmers, no food, no future.
	Yes, you get it!
	So you gotta understand, this is the end.
	This is the attack on food production in Germany.
	You know, these farmers are right to protest.
	This is the end of Germany.
	If the Greens continue to run the whole infrastructure into the ground, they will have no energy left.
	They will have no combustion engines, no diesel fuel, no farms.
	And then what are the Greens going to do?
	Eat each other?
	Cannibalism?
	Jerky Tuesday?
	Or what are they going to do at that point?
	How are they going to fight Russia, by the way?
	When they have no food, no farms, no fuel, no munitions, no tanks.
	And we're going to beat Russia, too.
	Yeah, good luck with that!
	How's that going to work?
	We're going to drive tractors over there against Russian tanks?
	Yeah, we've got a John Deere brigade over here.
	German farmers versus the Russian artillery.
	How's that going to go?
	You do see it, right, that the world's on fire right now.
	Chaos is breaking out everywhere.
	Escalation in the Middle East.
	Escalation in Europe, the takedown of food infrastructure, the takedown of energy infrastructure, the rigging of elections, the coming financial collapse, all these things converging all at the same time.
	And that's why I say have your own food, you know, off-grid food, storable food, healthrangerstore.com if you need some.
	Have your own off-grid money, you know, like Goldbacks.
	The website, again, is verifiedgoldbacks.com.
	Have your own off-grid medicine.
	Have ivermectin on hand for agricultural use.
	Have, you know, iodine.
	Have sanitation items.
	You know, isopropyl alcohol, povidone iodine.
	Chlorine dioxide, hydrogen peroxide, household bleach.
	I mean, have these sanitizing solutions, cleaning solutions available because what if in the midst of all of this, the globalists launch Disease X? Because you know that's what they're planning.
	Disease X. And Disease X is rumored to be 20 times more fatal than COVID because they didn't kill enough people with COVID, you know?
	Well, they kill like 20 million people, roughly.
	So if it's 20 times more fatal than 400 million people, maybe they can get close to half a billion dead.
	Or maybe they can kill billions more if they combine the food sabotage, the energy takedowns, financial collapse, social chaos, nuclear false flag attacks, and disease X. On top of that, maybe the globalists can get the billions dead that they want.
	But your defense against that is preparedness.
	Be prepared in every way possible.
	And you know the list.
	I mean, I've mentioned a lot of it here today, but it's good to double down as much as you can.
	I mean, be smart about it.
	If you do spend money on preparedness items, do so wisely and shore up the weakest parts of your preparedness plans first.
	But I think anybody left holding dollars when the music stops is going to be just wiped out.
	And having hard assets, real things that you have under your control is going to be the winning strategy in my view.
	Then again, I'm not a financial advisor.
	Just as a disclaimer, do your own research.
	Get your own financial advisors.
	Find experts out there if you can.
	But there are no experts in the collapse of the end of the dollar.
	There are no experts because that hasn't happened before.
	And if you talk to most financial experts, they'll tell you, oh, that will never happen, because they don't know history.
	That every fiat currency that has been printed into oblivion has collapsed.
	And this one will, too.
	Probably very soon.
	And then all these so-called experts will say, well, gosh, that was a black swan event.
	We couldn't model that.
	We didn't see that coming.
	Nobody could have known.
	And you've got to tell them, Health Ranger knew.
	Joe Salenti knew about that.
	A lot of people that knew.
	Gregory Manorino knew.
	Bill Holter knew.
	Andy Sheckman knew.
	A whole bunch of people knew about it.
	And we're sounding the alarm as loudly as we can.
	Because it's obvious.
	It's so obvious at this point.
	What is happening?
	So, get prepared as best you can.
	Because what's coming, I mean, you see it.
	War escalation, financial demise, you know, panicked Democrats, panicked globalists, disease X, whatever.
	None of this is looking good.
	The next couple of years are going to be the most difficult, explosive years of our lives.
	All of us.
	All of you listening, myself included.
	Any of us living today...
	2024 and 2025, I predict, will be the most challenging and difficult years that we've ever seen, and will likely ever see in our entire lives.
	Just get ready, folks.
	It's going to be interesting.
	And now, as promised, I'm going to run the interview with Gonzalo Lira from September 2022.
	And listen carefully to the words of a man who was murdered by the United States of America and the nation of Ukraine for his speech.
	What could be so dangerous in his speech that they killed him for it?
	You're about to find out.
	Listen carefully.
	God bless you all, and I'll talk with you tomorrow.
	Welcome, folks, to this much-anticipated interview.
	I'm thrilled to have Gonzalo Lira joining us today.
	He joins us from Ukraine.
	Actually, it's late night in the USA, early morning his time in the Ukraine, to talk about psychological warfare versus kinetic actual 3D warfare, and to get his analysis of What he thinks is going on right now with Ukraine and Russia, the counteroffensive that Ukraine pushed into Izum, and then Russia's likely response.
	We'll talk about Western Europe and what's coming, the Gazprom Christmas gift and all that stuff.
	Mr.
	Lyra, thank you so much.
	It's an honor to have you on.
	Oh, thank you very much for having me on.
	It's always a pleasure.
	So, yeah.
	And thanks.
	So, about the situation here?
	Oh, yeah.
	But first, I'm sorry, let me mention your YouTube channel is GonzaloLira2.
	Yeah.
	Two I's, I guess.
	Yeah, two I's, exactly.
	Right.
	GonzaloLira2.
	So, folks, if you want to follow him there, check out that channel.
	Yeah, thank you very much.
	No, the situation with this counteroffensive, there's a complete disconnect between the reality on the ground and what is being sold to the Western public insofar as what happened with this offensive.
	There were actually a series of offensives.
	There were, the way you count it, you can call it either two or three.
	And it looks like there's going to be another offensive in the not-too-distant future.
	But, see, these offensives...
	We're catastrophic for the Zelensky regime and for the Ukraine side.
	They lost over 12,000 men.
	I mean, 12,000 men killed in action in these three offensives.
	And the Russians...
	Go ahead.
	I hadn't heard the numbers that high yet.
	I definitely heard thousands.
	But are you saying not just wounded, but killed 12,000?
	Yes, killed 12,000.
	Wow.
	Wounded in action is likely double that number.
	The wounded to killed in action is usually between 2 and 3 to 1.
	The numbers that are coming out Are catastrophic insofar as this.
	Because you see, like in the Kharkov offensive, what was the issue?
	I live in Kharkov city.
	I'm in the center of the city.
	Last Friday when the Russians had this missile strike, I was there!
	I was here!
	I saw it!
	And the lights went out and the whole shebang.
	So anyway, the point is that when the Ukrainians carried out this offensive, they carried it out against a part of the region of Kharkov.
	It's like New York City, New York State, the city of Kharkov and the region of Kharkov.
	The sector of the region that the Russians had captured early on was to the north and to the east of the city.
	And what happened was that the Zelensky regime forces mounted a heavy offensive.
	Now, what happens in a military offensive is that you have to get out of your defenses And move forward.
	And so you expose your troops.
	And so since the Russians have an advantage in artillery fire, and they have an advantage in aircraft and air defense systems, see, the Ukraine forces were completely exposed.
	And so in that offense...
	Go ahead.
	Well, for our audience, I want to underscore the artillery advantage by the Russians, I think, is generally cited as 10 to 1.
	And is that?
	Yeah, okay.
	And then secondly, as you said, it seems like what Ukraine did was they traded men for territory.
	So the cost of gaining that ground was dire in terms of lost soldiers that cannot be simply replaced.
	Yes, exactly.
	And to add insult to injury, it is emerging that the Russians for the past several weeks, they knew that this offensive was coming, and they had been pulling out their people for weeks, plural.
	And so the actual force defending this territory numbered, and this sounds outrageous, but it seems to be true.
	It seems that they had only between 1,000 and 2,000 troops there against an attacking force of something like 30,000.
	And that 30,000 group went into essentially surrendered territory.
	And the Ukraine forces went in there, and of course, they were exposed.
	And since they have no air cover, since they have no air defense systems, because the Russians have destroyed them all, and they certainly don't have the artillery, they were completely exposed, and they suffered losses of 4,000 men killed And likely twice that number severely wounded.
	And so out of a force of about 30,000 men, they lost at least 10,000.
	For nothing.
	For cow country.
	Because I've been there.
	It's cow country.
	There's nothing.
	It's just empty fields.
	If you have more offensives like this, you're going to lose the war really, really quick.
	And in the West, they have this weird notion that Ukraine's captured all this territory.
	This is such a wonderful thing.
	But you see, the Russians, they don't care about territory.
	Their objective is to destroy the Kiev regime armed forces.
	That's their goal.
	That's their stated goal.
	They've said so repeatedly.
	So for them, this was like Christmas morning, because they got to destroy a whole bunch of soldiers who will not be fighting them in the future.
	And they had to give up, you know, yeah, it's like 2,000 square kilometers, but you have to keep in mind, this country is enormous.
	This country, Ukraine, is the size of Texas.
	When you actually look at the map and you look at the captured territory, it's minuscule.
	Russia has captured at this time over 150,000 square kilometers.
	So 2,000 square kilometers is about 1% of the territory.
	So it means nothing.
	Is it your conclusion then that Russia deliberately weakened their lines almost to invite this to come in or that they simply took advantage of Well, All those soldiers, at least I read, were armed with NATO gear and some NATO training and even NATO contractor personnel as well.
	At least that's what I heard.
	But do you think this was all deliberate?
	There are multiple possibilities and multiple schools have thought on these issues.
	Some people say that it was Russian incompetence and that they shouldn't have let that flank get so weakened.
	They should have shorted up.
	Others say, oh no, this was a trap, you know, from the get-go.
	There's all kinds of opinions about it.
	But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
	It could have been a complete Russian mistake that they flipped around on the Ukrainians and got in a very powerful lick against them.
	It could be that.
	Or it could be that this was all pre-planned and it was all part of a plan and they knew exactly what they were doing.
	But the result is all that matters.
	It doesn't matter the intent.
	The result is between the Kursan offensives, which are in the south of the country, and the Kursan offensives were a catastrophe because there they went up against top-tier Russian soldiers.
	You see in the Kharkov region, They were going up against not top-tier Russian soldiers or even the allied militias of the DPR and LPR. They were going up against essentially Russian territorial defense forces, okay?
	I mean, you know, not combat soldiers.
	Right.
	Just there to kind of occupy for the moment.
	Yeah, just to keep an eye on things.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so, you know, where the Ukraine forces have gone up against, you know, top tier Russian soldiers, they don't make a dent.
	Okay.
	They did make a salient that is an incursion.
	They broke through and entered a salient in the south and around the Kyrgyzstan region.
	But the Russians went ahead and blew up this dam.
	And the dam Flooded this river and the river cut off these soldiers.
	That's why they blew up the dam.
	They didn't blow up the dam just to harm civilians because actually they don't harm civilians.
	The Russians are not interested in destroying civilian infrastructure except in so far as it's being used by the enemy.
	And so what they did was they blew up that dam.
	It flooded this river.
	And now there are several thousand Ukraine soldiers who have been cut off because they crossed that river with pontoon bridges.
	That river was to their rear.
	And so now that river is flooded, and they're cut off from supplies, from reinforcements, and from retreat.
	So they're going to be annihilated.
	And that's going to be another, you know, four to seven thousand men.
	It's not clear how many are in that saline at this time.
	But, you know, the Russians...
	Look, I've said this many times.
	The Italians are good at food.
	The French are good at fashion.
	And the Russians, well, they're good at war.
	They know what they're doing.
	OK, and when the hysteria started of these of the Kharkov offensive and the Kursan offensive and all the rest of it, and everybody said that, oh, the Russians are losing.
	I was like, these guys don't make a mistake insofar as war is concerned.
	You can argue with that and say a lot of things about the Russians, but they're not stupid and they don't make mistakes when it comes to war, or at least not big ones.
	And so you have to wait and see.
	And they're winning.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, let me jump in with a couple of questions.
	One is about the town of Izum, which I believe that is currently under the control of Ukrainian forces.
	Is that your understanding as well?
	Yes, it is.
	In fact, Zelensky gave a little, you know, a flashy visit there and took a picture of himself there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But isn't that city of some significant logistical importance in terms of access to roads?
	It was.
	The Russians spent a lot of effort capturing Izym because they expected Izym to be the jumping-off point to be able to attack to the south, what the Russians called Sherwood Forest.
	That was a big forest with a lot of Ukrainian soldiers defending it.
	So they thought that this would be the perfect...
	Village and springboard.
	And it was indeed a crossroads of the railroad system.
	And that they thought that this would be the perfect place to, you know, do resupplying, you know, and also as a jumping off point for offenses.
	But they captured Isium Look, offhand, I can't recall if it was April or May, but it was a couple of months ago at least.
	And so what happened was that they made the effort to go south from Izium, but it didn't work.
	The defenses were too hardened and would cost too many lives and too many Russian troops.
	And their resupply routes, they were able to reroute them in other directions and make their logistics more efficient.
	So in the end, they didn't need ISIUM. That's the point.
	You see, sometimes in the military, I've never been in the army myself or in the military, but, you know, you pick up a lot as you're following a war this closely.
	Yeah, it's living in your case.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so sometimes, you know, some random hill is essential today, but next week it means nothing.
	So Isium was essential two months ago, but today it means nothing.
	And so, you know, the fact that they lost it doesn't mean anything.
	Because ultimately, see, you always have to remember what their goal is.
	And their goal is to destroy Ukraine forces.
	Their goal is not to capture territory, just to capture territory, just for the sake of it.
	Right, right.
	It doesn't matter where they are.
	It doesn't matter where they operate geographically.
	Their goal is to diminish the ability of the Ukrainian forces to wage future action, essentially.
	Exactly.
	That's exactly it.
	And so they don't care if they lose Izium.
	You could say that it's a very cold-blooded or very cynical calculation to abandon the city, that a lot of the native population, the local population, help you out.
	Perhaps.
	But, you know, in war, you have to make cold-hearted decisions that are sometimes very ugly, but very necessary.
	You have to sacrifice these people over here to save these people over there.
	You see what I mean?
	Well, speaking of those decisions, I'd like to ask your interpretation of the Russian missile strikes that took place.
	You talked about it earlier.
	They struck, I believe, electrical infrastructure in certain cities.
	You spent a day without electricity in many other areas.
	Yes, yes.
	Right.
	But two questions on that.
	Number one, what do you suppose was the point of that?
	And secondly, why wasn't it followed up with an effort to permanently disable those electrical infrastructure if, in fact, Russia wanted to take that down on a long-term basis?
	I mean, how does it serve Russia to just have the lights off for a little bit, but then it recovers?
	What do you think is the point of that?
	That's a really good question.
	I don't know.
	They must have a very good reason, though.
	I mean, because they don't...
	There's a saying that the Russians don't go to the bathroom without a plan.
	And that's accurate.
	They really are.
	They have always a very good reason to do something.
	And so the fact that they knocked out the lights...
	When was it?
	On Friday, was it?
	And then on...
	The days have bled into each other.
	Tuesday, I think.
	I'm on the 12th story of my building.
	I had to go up and down.
	It was not fun.
	No elevator, not fun at all.
	And I'm a smoker, so that was just not fun.
	Anyway, the point.
	I don't know.
	I can't give you an answer.
	There has been some intelligent speculation.
	A guy called Dima at a YouTube channel called Military Summary, which is very good.
	Yes, I've seen that.
	Yeah, he gives daily briefings of the situation on the front.
	His YouTube channel is called Military Summary Channel, and it's fantastic.
	He speculated that the Russians wanted to slow down The Ukraine train system.
	Because the train system in Ukraine, 90% of it is electric.
	And the Russians, in one go, in just one go, in a two-hour strike, they took out the entire electrical grid of the whole country.
	Now, the Ukrainians, they took it out at 8 p.m., I remember, and the Ukraine technicians restored it at, like, around 2 a.m.
	I can tell because the next morning I saw my microwave, you know, the clock on my microwave.
	You know, when the power goes out, it starts at 12 noon and starts running again, right?
	And so that's how I figured out that it was restored at 2 a.m.
	Anyway...
	So for those six hours, the lights were out.
	If the Russians had wanted that to continue throughout the rest of the morning, they could have done that.
	I suspect that they did it because they wanted to stop the trains, because the Ukrainian armed forces are moving troops and equipment around via trains.
	Because, of course, you can't have tanks running down a highway.
	It just chews up the concrete.
	And more importantly, it spends all your gas.
	You don't want to be spending gasoline moving troops around.
	So you move them by train.
	And same with the troops.
	And so, Dima at the military semi-channel was, I thought, a very shrewd observation.
	He thought that it was the Russians wanting to stop movement of troops, probably to have an intelligence re-evaluation to see where the battlefield was on all fronts.
	And that's an intelligent, very shrewd guess.
	I don't know.
	Nobody knows what the Russian general staff is thinking.
	But they did it again on...
	I keep forgetting.
	Monday or Tuesday?
	Tuesday.
	Tuesday.
	Oh, yeah.
	Because they were supposed to repair my hot water heater here.
	And it was on Tuesday, on Tuesday morning, that they knocked out the lights in the whole city from, I think it was like around 8 a.m.
	until...
	I think around 4, perhaps, or no, around like 2.30, something like that.
	And so why they did that on those two separate occasions, I'm not clear.
	Nobody is.
	Well, I have so many questions about this, and let me throw a couple your way.
	So one question is, domestically, if Russia were to continue to strike electrical infrastructure targets in Ukraine, surely at some point very soon, the supply of spare components is gone, right?
	Especially with manufacturing now shut down, not only in Western Europe, but somewhat in China as well.
	Where do you keep getting these components to repair the blown-up Buildings or portions of buildings that cause the lights to go out, right?
	So that's one question.
	I've got another, but do you want to respond to that one?
	I have no idea.
	I mean, simple as that.
	I have no idea how they are repairing this stuff.
	But they are, obviously, because we're talking on the internet and the lights are on here in Carpenter.
	In the city, at least.
	So I cannot answer that question.
	I don't even know where to start.
	Well, the second question, though, is a bigger theater of war question, given that, I believe, various officials in Russia have been...
	Warning in the last couple of days that NATO should stop funneling weapons through Ukraine and training Ukrainian soldiers and essentially running much of the Ukraine war, and essentially implying that if NATO forces don't do that, that they may face some larger counterattack by Russia.
	And my question to you is, isn't it technically possible for Russia to use For example, the hypersonic missiles to hit electrical infrastructure in Germany or other nations.
	They don't have to limit themselves to Ukraine, and it doesn't have to be nuclear.
	It could be non-nuclear striking other countries to slow down the same kind of weapons coming in.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, about the weapons coming in, this is my guess, okay, what I'm about to say.
	So, you know, take it that I am not a military man, but this is what I understand, is that a lot of these weapon systems, like leopard tanks from Germany, the famous HIMAR systems that arrive here, the M777 howitzers and all the rest, it takes several months to train.
	Months, plural.
	So, my guess is What's going on is that these weapons are filtering in.
	And it's not the weapons that bother the Russians.
	It's the NATO troops that are manning those weapons.
	Because the Zelensky regime does not have the time to train its soldiers to operate that weaponry.
	So my guess, and this is a guess...
	What is really upsetting the Russians is the fact that NATO troops or NATO-adjacent troops, i.e.
	private contractors, who technically aren't under the orders of NATO, but in actuality they are, Are the ones operating these weapons systems.
	And it's known that there are a large number of foreign fighters here, professional fighters, not the volunteers that came in initially, who ran in horror after they got one dose of Russian artillery, because those guys went away.
	And they came in thinking, oh, we're going to kill some Russkies.
	And the Russians had another thing coming.
	Okay, so no, we need weapons.
	It is my guess, and I think it's a reasonable inference, that if it takes you two months at least to learn how to operate leopard tanks, because you've never had any experience with a leopard tank, then to operate in a combat-effective way.
	It's not describing a tank.
	That's right.
	People think that you hop in a tank and you just drive it around and start blowing stuff up.
	I like a video game.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They think it's like that, you know?
	No, as I've explained, people have asked me the same question.
	And I said, well, there's a difference between getting a driver's permit to drive a car versus being a professional race car driver who can win races.
	That takes years and exceptional skill.
	Exactly.
	That's an outstanding analogy.
	You hit it right on the money.
	And I'm going to steal that from you.
	Okay, please do.
	Because you're right.
	You're absolutely right.
	It's exactly that.
	Between getting a learner's permit and being in the Daytona 500.
	You and I both drive.
	I'm assuming you drive.
	I drive quite a bit.
	And I wouldn't get behind the wheel of a Daytona 500 car.
	No way!
	No, we'd be blown away by the professional drivers.
	I mean, we'd be left in the dust.
	We'd crash!
	Yeah, we'd crash!
	Quite frankly, and probably in the first go-around, you need to know what you're doing.
	These weapons.
	So that's why I believe that what is upsetting the Russians is the passive aggressive, surreptitious infiltration of NATO troops into this conflict.
	That's what's probably bothering them.
	And that's why they told the Germans that it's a red line if they start shipping tanks, because they know who's going to be manning those tanks.
	It's going to be either German soldiers or German soldiers who have resigned five minutes ago and have been hired on by some private contracting firm.
	But it's basically the German state that is financing this operation.
	And so I think that's what's going on.
	And make no mistake, see, the M777 howitzers, Heimar systems, these are sophisticated, complex systems.
	They are not, I have to insist, well, you already made the point with your brilliant analogy.
	And so the point is, I think that that's what's pissing them off.
	Now, will the Russians attack in EU territory outside of the theory of operations?
	No, I don't think so.
	Because that would, to them, would be an enormous escalation.
	And what the Russians' priority is to not escalate, to keep this at a steady grind.
	Because this steady grind is working for them.
	And so, look, I want to turn a little bit to the reaction in the West.
	I've heard a lot of people, I've heard this man, Peter Zion, Z-E-I-H-A-N, who's like a geopolitical pundit.
	And he is just ecstatic and saying, oh, the Russians are losing, they're going to get kicked out of the country, you know, the Zelensky regime is going to march on Moscow or something like that.
	It's absurd.
	It's crazy.
	It's totally delusional.
	And like I said before, it doesn't matter if the Russians were caught with their pants down in the Kharkov region, or if this was all pre-planned and they knew exactly what they were doing.
	It doesn't matter.
	What matters is the net result.
	The Russians gave up this territory that was of no military use to them.
	They reforged on the west, on the east side of some river that separates Kharkov region from Lugansk.
	I forget the name of the river, it doesn't really matter.
	And they're in a much better position to defend there.
	They gave up all this territory.
	They didn't use that many troops.
	I mean, if they lost troops, it would be in the hundreds and the very low hundreds.
	And they inflicted 4,000 dead and perhaps twice that number of incapacitated on the Zelensky regime forces.
	So from their point of view, this was a win.
	If the rest of the world wants to think that the Russians lost, it doesn't matter because at the end of the day, you don't win the war on Twitter.
	You win the war on the ground by defeating the enemy army.
	That's the whole point.
	Let me augment that if you don't mind.
	Sure.
	It could matter to the extent that if the PSYOPs of the West are able to, let's say, substantially alter Russia's own domestic population's perceptions, if that were very effective, and you know the PSYOPs are very, very strong, well-funded, very aggressive, and so on, couldn't that alter the dynamics of the domestic pressure against Putin and, in essence, force him into more rapid escalation?
	Yeah, that's a good point, but there are two things that go against that.
	Number one, the West has basically cut off internet to Russia, right?
	So Western information is not getting to Russia.
	Google left.
	They've all left.
	They've all cut off all contact because of the sanctions.
	So not that much information from the West is filtering to Russia, number one.
	And number two, in Russia, initially, everybody was furious at the Russian army.
	But as the days have passed, and they're actually looking at the results, because the results are all that matter, they're realizing, oh, this wasn't a loss.
	This was a win, a very clever win.
	Again, irrespective of whether the Russians neglected that front and, you know, took their eye off the ball, and they were caught by surprise, which is, it's not the case, by the way, because the Russians from Izium were removing people, including civilians, for at least two weeks before the start of this offensive in Kharkov.
	So they knew it was coming.
	The Russians, again, for all the faults that they may have or you may accuse them of, bad intelligence is not one of them.
	They know exactly what's going on in all of Ukraine.
	Indeed.
	And so the fact that they...
	That they removed troops, removed civilian personnel for at least two weeks indicates that they knew that this was coming.
	They planned accordingly.
	Because also you could say that, oh, they started removing troops because they knew that they couldn't reinforce that area.
	Fine.
	But they fell back to a more defensible position.
	The Zanthi regime forces were utterly exposed and utterly annihilated by artillery and air power.
	And so in the end, again, I have to insist, the results are all that matter.
	You have to keep in mind, like I said, the Cresson offensive that happened in late August, that started in late August, and the Zaporozhye offensive, and the The Karkov offensive.
	Each of those lost approximately 4,000 troops in each of these three theaters.
	That's the estimate.
	Even if you go more conservative and say it was not 12,000, say it was just 8,000.
	With the same number, with double that number of incapacitated wounded, right?
	So you're still talking 24,000 men that were taken off the battlefield.
	So somewhere between 24,000 and 36,000 Zelensky regime forces were basically taken out.
	And this is catastrophic.
	No army can sustain such losses.
	And the worst part is that in the West, they're believing their own PR. They're believing their own nonsense.
	I don't know if I can use four-letter words in this conversation.
	I won't.
	Well, yeah, we prefer you don't.
	Yeah.
	They believe their own nonsense, their own PR, their own propaganda.
	And so they are, rather than doing the smart thing, which would have been to negotiate an end to hostilities now, because at least they have the perception that they're winging, and so they could go to the negotiation table.
	No, we're going to have more offenses.
	And notice, in Zaporozhye and in Kursan, there has been absolutely zero advance.
	You know, pockets here and there, and except for that one salient around Kursan, which has, like I said, it's estimated between 3,000 and 7,000 troops.
	It's not really clear how many, but it doesn't really matter.
	They all got cut off.
	They're all going to be, you know, either annihilated or taken prisoner of war.
	And so, if you have these wins, you're going to lose a war.
	See?
	And they're going to do another one now.
	Well, there are a couple of factors here that I want to bring in, too.
	And one is, I want to ask you about the axis of time.
	And I think you pointed out something very observant when you said that Russia doesn't want an escalation of this.
	And when you consider the progression of time and as the Earth is moving in its orbital path around the sun with its axial tilt, the days will become colder and colder and colder for northern Europe.
	And winter becomes almost a weapon, just cold weather.
	And it seems like, well, I guess my question is, do you think that Putin, And knowing now that the what I'm calling the suicide sanctions that were initiated by the West have backfired so catastrophically to the point where Western industry leaders are now warning about, quote, permanent deindustrialization of the continent. permanent deindustrialization of the continent.
	That Putin, all he has to do is kind of wait for winter to kick in?
	And that's...
	It's cheaper than artillery, too.
	Yeah, exactly right.
	Look, the people of Western Europe are going to go cold, dark, and hungry this winter.
	And see, this cannot be changed anymore.
	It's like when you watch that video of a car crash, and it's in slow motion, in super slow motion, right?
	Yeah.
	The car crash already happened, even as the first fender starts to bend against the concrete that it's striking.
	It already happened.
	You're just watching the effects, the inevitable effects that cannot be changed.
	Even if Europe somehow had completely different political leadership, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that there's some sort of weird spot election and all the people who are pro-sanctions and anti-Russian and all the rest of it, they were kicked out of office and replaced by pro-Russian politicians.
	The Russians, the Kremlin, does not trust them.
	So they'll never agree to any kind of negotiation.
	Never.
	Okay?
	Any kind of negotiation is going to take months, if not years.
	And so this winter, the next four or five months, are going to be catastrophic for Europe.
	And this is a reality that cannot be changed.
	Okay?
	There will never flow gas from Russia to Europe.
	Period.
	The people in Europe...
	We'll go cold, dark, and hungry, like I said.
	And you've got to keep in mind something else that people don't seem to understand.
	When they say that there isn't going to be gas, because you have to keep in mind There is no way, there's no place that can provide the energy resources that Europe needs for this winter.
	There is no place except Russia.
	And the Europeans did it to themselves because they were anti-nuclear.
	Because nuclear power would have solved their problems.
	But they were so anti-nuclear because of green parties and climate change and all this nonsense.
	And by the way, I've never quite understood why Nuclear power, which is the cleanest energy around, is part of the green agenda.
	Yeah, there's no carbon emissions from nuclear power.
	Exactly.
	You know, because when you see those smokestacks of nuclear reactors, that smoke is water vapor.
	It's water vapor, yeah.
	Yeah, it does nothing to the environment, okay?
	And it's clean, pure water vapor because what it is is, of course, the steam that comes off the water that's cooling the turbines that drives the generators, right?
	And so it's the cleanest energy, but the green parties with their green agenda are anti-nuclear.
	And so the Europeans cannot get the natural gas that they need from any source, not the United States, nowhere.
	It's just not possible.
	And even if they could, the energy price is so high because of the sanctions.
	It's still going to break their economies because it's going to make them uncompetitive.
	And so what's happening, and people don't understand this, is that, see, the natural gas, it's not for electricity for people's homes, okay?
	It's for industry, okay?
	Because you see, industry is what eats up that electricity, that electrical power.
	And so if your factories cannot afford electricity, or there isn't electricity, they shut down.
	And when they shut down, people go unemployed.
	And those unemployed people, they go to their German welfare state, their French welfare state, and demand payments every month that the government does not have.
	And so all of a sudden, and of course, you lose the tax revenue from these industries.
	And so that's what's going on.
	When those factories go bankrupt, they don't just get mothballed.
	They sell off their assets.
	They default on leases.
	They lose the human knowledge base that used to run the factories goes somewhere else.
	And once you distribute all those resources to the winds of the far west and east or wherever, you can't start that factory again.
	It is permanent deindustrialization.
	And let me bring in one other element here that I think you'll find fascinating.
	Yesterday, in the same time slot, I interviewed Finnish economist Tomas Malanin, and he said that the exposure to the European banking system for the defaults of industry, that that exposure is absolutely catastrophic. that that exposure is absolutely catastrophic.
	And of course, it will have a domino effect to American banks and other Western banks that have cross-invested in debt instruments and so on.
	So, you know, think about the chain reaction.
	Gazprom, no gas, no industry, defaults, bank failures, bank failures spread.
	And Putin is sitting back and, you know, toasting his feet in front of the fire and sipping on wine like, wow, winter is pretty awesome.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And also, there's something else, too, that's pretty funny.
	The Russians are selling less gas and less oil, but they're making more money because of higher prices.
	And they've got plenty of customers in India and in China.
	Now, of course, the Iranians, the Iranian Ayatollah and And Putin had a very pleasant meeting.
	I mean, you could see by the body language that they were just happy as clams to be chatting it up.
	And at the end of their meeting, they were talking about all kinds of industrial agreements and business and all the rest of it.
	And, you know, it's going Russia's way.
	And anybody in the mainstream media who tells you that this is the death blow of Russia and Russia is going to collapse tomorrow, you just have to go on YouTube and you can see all kinds of videos of English-speaking Russians who show you dating life in Russia.
	Yeah, sure.
	McDonald's went away, but the McDonald's franchise was bought up by some local, and they're selling Big Macs.
	They don't have Apple computers, but they have Lenovo computers and all kinds of other computers, and they're perfectly fine.
	You know, it's not affecting them.
	And people say, oh, the chips, these special chips that, you know, they're not going to get from the West.
	No, they'll just get them from China.
	And on top of that, it's an exaggeration that these microchips are that crucial to the economy that if you don't get them, the entire economy will collapse.
	It's copium.
	It's copium.
	I don't know if you've ever heard of this drug.
	It's a drug that you don't inject into your vein like heroin.
	No.
	You stick it into your eyes via your screen when you read all this nonsense.
	Because it's nonsense.
	And it's just all copium.
	Because, see, they have to justify to themselves this catastrophic mistake that they made.
	Because sanctions, historically, have never worked.
	And by the way, sanctions are a truly cruel weapon, because the only people who are injured are the common people of the country that's targeted with sanctions.
	We saw this in Cuba.
	Cuba has been under sanctions since, what, 1960 or whenever?
	And, well, has the island sunk?
	No.
	Has the leadership been changed?
	No.
	Same with Iran.
	The sanctions don't hurt the leadership of a country.
	On the contrary, the people are smart enough to realize that this is an attack on them.
	And so rather than be angry with their leadership, they realize, hey, the West hates us and wants to destroy us.
	They want to destroy my babushka.
	They want to destroy the future of my kids.
	I'm not going to be protesting against my leadership because the leadership was doing what I think was perfectly sensible.
	I'm going to hate the West.
	I'm not going to overthrow my leadership.
	And it's in Western Europe and the United States where you're going to see more and more repressive measures.
	You're already seeing it.
	The corporate media is not reporting on these massive protests that are going on in Germany, in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain.
	All of these protests, Czech Republic too, all of these protests are basically saying, stop with the sanctions, make nice with Russia.
	We see what's coming and we don't want any part of it.
	And the leadership of Western Europe is using its manipulation of the mainstream media to silence these voices.
	I mean, you don't hear any reporting whatsoever on what's going on.
	Those protests are only going to increase dramatically in the months ahead as people are freezing and starving.
	But about the sanctions themselves, I think...
	These sanctions are forcing Russia and giving it a financial motivation to expand its own domestic supply chain and domestic production.
	I mean, Russia manufactures microchips to some extent, and they can certainly manufacture a lot more.
	There's no lack of engineering intelligence in the Russian people where they can't make microchips.
	Of course they can.
	There's some of the just highest raw IQ people on the planet.
	Yeah.
	Then in the United States, the Pentagon just announced recently that they've halted all shipments of F-35s because there are components they found that use rare earth metals from China.
	So where Russia is sourcing domestically and actually building a domestic resiliency in its supply chain, the United States is depleting itself of its munitions by shipping them off to Ukraine while shutting down the actual delivery of its most modern fighter jet because the United States is depleting itself of its munitions by shipping them off to And there's no solution to that.
	I mean, contrast those two positions.
	Yeah.
	Well, look, Russia is the only country, as I see it, that is truly self-sufficient.
	If they shut off all their borders around the world, they'd be fine.
	Because they have the key resources.
	They have energy, they have food, and they have raw materials for industry.
	So they can shut themselves off from the rest of the world and become a hermit country.
	And they will be fine.
	That is the calculation that the West did not make.
	They kept thinking that sanctions are the way to go.
	And you have to keep in mind, too, they've invested so many psychological chips that at this point, you know, Borrell, the foreign minister for the EU, he's basically saying that...
	That it's a war between the West and Russia.
	They've invested so much that they can't pull back.
	They won't pull back.
	They'll just keep on doubling down.
	Any kind of domestic resistance in the West will be crushed.
	The Germans have announced that on the 1st of October, they are going to deploy It's not a democracy anymore.
	You have this professional leadership class that is completely incompetent, that has made catastrophic decisions, that is directly affecting the people of Europe and the United States.
	And, you know, Europe is going to be economically annihilated.
	And here's something else, too, that people aren't giving much consideration to at this time, but I think is going to be a big issue.
	Europe has an enormous migrant population from Africa and from the Middle East, right?
	They threw open their borders and, you know, we can do it, you know, is Angela Merkel's famous phrase.
	And they brought in all of these migrants.
	And these people are not used to the cold.
	They're not used to the dark.
	They thought that they'd go to Europe and it would be the land of milk and honey where all the sidewalks are made from gold.
	And what are they going to be?
	They're going to be cold and they're going to be hungry.
	They're not going to be happy.
	Those people potentially can be a powder keg of just all kinds of misery.
	And I pointed that out on my Twitter account and my Twitter account got banned because of that.
	Of course.
	Yeah, because of course, because you have to repress the news that you don't want to hear.
	And so Europe is lost, and there's no coming back.
	And Europe will be deindustrialized.
	People will go hungry.
	And of course, the fabulous welfare state that they have depends on industry paying taxes, a lot of taxes, and individuals paying a lot of taxes.
	But when you have all those people who used to pay taxes are now unemployed, where are you going to get the money?
	What they're going to wind up doing is they're going to have to print money.
	Exactly.
	You've got to keep in mind, no matter how much money you print, if the good or service is not available in terms of energy, it doesn't matter how much money you have.
	You can have a million dollars.
	But if you're stuck in the Sahara Desert with no water, the million dollars, you can set it on fire.
	It's not going to help you, you see?
	And that's the problem of Europe.
	They're going to print euros, as they are doing, and give them to all the people.
	And the people are going to take those euros and go to the supermarket and say, hey, where's the food?
	And they're going to go to the gas station and say, hey, where's the gasoline for my car?
	Where's the electricity for the heating in my home?
	This is the key.
	You've really hit upon the key disconnect.
	I'm so glad you brought up this point where so much of Western civilization today is operating in the realm of financialization or virtualization of assets where they think, oh, we can trade commodities on paper and that the paper is the commodity, but it isn't.
	Yeah.
	Or that we can print money, and then that's how we can help people afford electricity.
	But the electricity isn't there.
	The kilowatt hours don't exist because the gas doesn't exist.
	And so you could have...
	The Swifts, who are threatened with three years of prison if they heat their homes above 19 degrees Celsius, you could make them all billionaires with cash or whatever currency, but they're still freezing, right?
	Exactly.
	And by the way, to the Swiss bros who might be listening, see, if I were you, I'd go to prison.
	Because you'd get the heat.
	Yeah, because in prison you'll be fed and you'll be warm.
	Right, right.
	That's the first question.
	But, you know, you also realize that the Swiss government is going to have to deploy temperature police.
	Right.
	To run around the cities with little thermal sensors and zapping your window to see how much heat is leaking.
	And this is a whole new level of a police state that even the Nazis hadn't come up with that.
	It's incredible.
	And also, there's going to be a bigger push for digital currencies and the Internet of Things so that you can be controlled.
	I mean, I personally, when I was living, until recently, I was living in the Netherlands.
	Okay.
	And I personally was totally against any kind of Internet of Things or Siri or whatever, you know, AI was in my home.
	You know, because, you know, it'll be easy to monitor people.
	And this is going to be Panopticon.
	I don't know if you've ever heard of the Panopticon prison.
	It's a prison.
	It was a thought experiment where basically the warden or the guards would be at the center of a circular prison.
	And all the prison cells are on the outside facing into the center.
	And from the center, everybody can be monitored.
	This is a panopticon state that we're going to be arriving at, whereby the central authority is monitoring every single person.
	And everybody is a prisoner.
	The fact that they are trying to cut off people from moving to the east, moving to Russia, It's turning into a prison continent.
	Europe is.
	It's going against every Western value.
	Every Christian value and the inheritors of the Christian values of the Enlightenment, they are going against all of them.
	The dignity of the individual, free speech, freedom of movement, all of that is going out the window because of the catastrophic mistakes.
	That they made.
	And it's too late.
	It can't be taken back.
	I mean, if you wanted to, you know, as a thought experiment, you could have said that maybe in May, you know, or maybe June, they could have rolled this back.
	But now it's too late.
	And like I said, see, the psychology of these leaders, they cannot admit a mistake.
	They cannot.
	They cannot say, I done goofed.
	And they have to continue with these policies that...
	When you take the big macro step back and you look at the expanse of history, you have to remember that Europe and the United States were always political backwaters.
	And people don't remember this or understand this in a historical context.
	But you have to understand that the center of the world has always been Asia, China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, all those countries in Asia.
	And Russia has been sort of like peripheral to Asia.
	Western Europe was a backwater.
	People don't seem to understand this, but between the end of the Roman Empire and approximately 1600, Europe was a wasteland.
	Nobody wanted to go there, okay?
	And it was only through a series of historical accidents and the emergence of industrialization in Europe, which started in Europe, especially Great Britain and the Netherlands.
	That's when you had these great colonial powers going around and establishing empires.
	And from 1600 until now, that's why Europe and the United States, especially after, you know, Really, starting with 1918, they became the dominant players.
	But this is a historical fluke.
	The resources and the people are in Asia and Russia.
	And Europe is forcibly de-industrializing itself through incompetence.
	And they're going to go back to being a backwater.
	Poor...
	Without food, without any natural resources, because Europe doesn't have any natural resources to speak of.
	It has coal at best, and that's it.
	And so you won't be allowed to burn it, though, to heat your home.
	That would be illegal.
	No, because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would throw a hissy fit.
	She'd start crying at some fence somewhere.
	I mean, come on.
	Yes.
	Now, Gonzalo, I want to be mindful of your time.
	Are you okay to spend a couple more minutes?
	Sure.
	You can go as long as you like.
	I mean, I'm just hanging out, having coffee, smoking a cigarette, and watching a very quiet car car this morning.
	So, yeah.
	Okay, great.
	Well, and folks, if you're enjoying this interview, be sure to check out Gonzalo's channel.
	He is still somehow on YouTube, GonzaloLira2, or the second, I suppose.
	I mean, it means his second channel, I believe.
	Yes, it is.
	I couldn't come up with a better name.
	But he has these very interesting roundtables with some very intelligent people joining to talk about things.
	And, you know, what I find fascinating about the roundtables that you do is whether or not someone agrees or disagrees with the guests that you have on, at least in every single case, they are a thoughtful, intelligent, reasoned person or their argument is reasoned.
	Whereas when you turn on Western media, it's just script reading dumb as dirt propaganda.
	Like these people are morons.
	Right?
	You said it.
	I didn't.
	I'm too polite for that.
	No, that was me being polite.
	Are you kidding?
	I held back the profanity.
	I didn't want to say, you know, like, Buck Fiden or something like that.
	But your guests are intelligent whether or not you agree with them, you know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's the point.
	The point of the show is to bring together people who, if they disagree or not, that's perfectly fine.
	Oops.
	Hello.
	Do you still hear me?
	Yeah, I still hear you.
	I lost my little ear pod.
	Yeah, the point of the show is to have intelligent people who disagree, perhaps, but it's always simple and it's always based on fact.
	It's not just, oh, because it's like that and I think so.
	No, that doesn't fly in my shows.
	And so I never have guests who are propagandists.
	I have guests who have thoughtful positions.
	Whether I agree with them or not is irrelevant.
	What's interesting to me is to have smart conversations.
	Look, I always think of it like a really good dinner party where you have random guests.
	Talking about different things.
	And yeah, that's the approach I take.
	That kind of civil discussion between intelligent people I think is sorely lacking, unfortunately.
	But it's the level of the discourse that we have today where people think that they have to shout and have the dumbest ideas possible to make themselves noticed, which is a pity.
	But that's the way things are today.
	And also, of course, the mainstream media.
	The corporate media, the controlled media, doesn't want people to understand what's going on.
	That's why I want to come back to the issue of these offensives, that in the West, I've noticed that they are hysterical.
	They think that this is like, you know, hallelujah, you know, they're going to win and they took back all this territory and, you know, any day now they're going to take back Crimea and then after that they're going to take Moscow.
	I'm like, what are you talking about?
	And you have to keep in mind something else, too.
	A lot of times people see some video of, say, some Russian soldiers being captured or some Russian tank being blown up.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	Because you have tens of thousands of soldiers on either side of the front.
	I mean, altogether, I mean, just a casual guesstimate.
	I'd say that at any given time on the contact line, on the front of the war front between Russia and Ukraine, there must be a good 100,000 that are facing each other and shooting each other.
	100,000, that's bigger than any stadium.
	And you have to keep in mind, too, that the front...
	You look on a map, and it's no big deal, but you actually start to measure the distances.
	It's 1,200 kilometers.
	That's roughly 800 miles, okay?
	And so it's enormous.
	And so any particular video that you look at, you have to kind of like, oh, that's interesting, but kind of ignore it.
	Well, people have to come...
	Go ahead.
	I'm sorry, but people are so very much fixated on the geography and the map, and I'd like to share kind of an internal thought that I've had on this, is in the game of chess.
	So everybody knows how chess starts out, one player on one side, one player on the other.
	But especially later in the game, it doesn't matter which squares you control.
	What matters is eliminating the enemy's Knights and bishops and queens in this case that can exert power.
	If you eliminate their pieces, it doesn't matter where you are on the board.
	Yeah, you're going to win.
	Exactly.
	And that is demilitarization, is eliminating the opponent's pieces.
	Even if you have to maneuver around, you have to give, you have to take, you have to retreat from time to time, you have to faint, whatever the case may be.
	I mean, that's, you know, speaking of Russia, that's chess also.
	Yeah, and look, there are From the very beginning of this conflict, there was no way for the Zelensky regime to win.
	It was simply not possible.
	And they should have negotiated some sort of ceasefire, some sort of settlement months ago.
	It's too late now.
	Because the Russians, they just don't believe the West.
	They just don't believe them.
	And so you cannot make a contract, an agreement with someone, if you don't believe in them.
	If you don't believe that they will hold up their end of the bargain.
	Yes.
	I mean, every business deal that you have, there is an element of trust.
	And, you know, it goes both ways.
	And it has to be there.
	But if it's gone, as it is now, it's gone forever.
	It's never coming back.
	Because there was the Minsk agreement, the Minsk 2 agreements that were signed in 2015.
	And for almost seven years, the West, Germany and France and the United States made no effort whatsoever to implement these agreements.
	That's right.
	And so if for seven years you have a peace agreement that would have brought long-lasting peace to the region and stability and all the rest of it, and you don't agree to it, Then how is anybody going to believe you when you come later and say, no, no, no, no, now I'm really going to sit down and nobody's going to believe you.
	Okay?
	And so it's as simple as that.
	And so the Russians are going to keep on going in the slow grind.
	A lot of people are saying, oh, maybe they're going to up Yes.
	Yes.
	And I know people who knew her personally, and they were like, you know, she's just some, you know, PhD student and commentator, and then very charismatic and very liked by a lot of people, but she was a nobody politically, and they assassinated her knowingly.
	You know, you have this, you know, persecution of Russian speakers, you have...
	Well, you know, all kinds of nastiness going on in the Zelensky regime.
	They're really just a nasty bunch.
	But the point here is, the serious point is, the Russians, I don't think that they're going to up the ante insofar as calling this an anti-terrorist operation.
	They're going to keep on grinding because it's working for them.
	It's working.
	And here's a key issue.
	From the very beginning of this conflict, The Western military analysts were saying, why aren't the Russians using their best gear?
	Because, for instance, in their air defense systems, they're using what's known as the S-300 system.
	Oh, yeah, those are much older systems, yeah.
	Yeah, they have the S-400 and the S-500, which are way more sophisticated.
	I mean, these are always quantum leaps up, okay?
	The S-500, it's credibly believed that it could intercept any first strike, any nuclear first strike, and intercept all of the weapons in one go.
	And that's how sophisticated this stuff is.
	And here's another thing, that in the United States, because of arrogance that's been fed by Hollywood and distorted history, they believe that American military is the best in the world.
	That's not true.
	The American military does not have an air defense system that comes close to the S-300, let alone the S-400 and the S-500.
	Yes, that's a fact.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	And a lot of people are wondering, you know, why isn't there like a no-fly zone?
	Why doesn't NATO impose no-fly zone?
	You know what you're talking about?
	And everybody was saying, if NATO were to do a no-fly zone in Ukraine, every single NATO plane, without exception, would be blown out of the sky by the S-400, which is the step up that the Russians have not deployed.
	Because the Russians are holding back their best gear because they still think, you know, maybe NATO is going to get involved, boots on the ground and the whole thing.
	And when that happens, that's war.
	And that's where we take the gloves off.
	Because as I said from the very beginning of this conflict here, the Russians have been tiptoeing through Ukraine.
	They don't want to break it.
	They don't want to destroy it.
	They don't want to do like what the United States did in Iraq or Syria.
	They want to do as little damage as possible to the civilian infrastructure, as little damage as possible to the country as a whole.
	They want to demilitarize and denosify, certainly, but they don't want to break the whole thing.
	That's why they haven't declared full war, and that's why I think that they're still at this SMO stage, Special Military Operations.
	Yes, I think...
	Because there would be escalation.
	And they don't want to escalate because they don't want to give NATO the excuse.
	Because they understand the United States and the Europeans much better than they understand themselves.
	Because the Western leadership class, if Russia were to up the ante, even if it goes from an SMO, a special military operation, to an anti-terrorist operation, there is significant factions in the West that would demand and get a NATO escalation.
	Okay, this is Mike Adams interrupting our conversation here.
	What you just heard is about the first hour of the interview with Gonzalo Lira that actually lasted two hours and 20 minutes.
	And the remainder of this interview will be posted tomorrow on my channel or this weekend, let's say, perhaps tomorrow, the next day on my channel on brighteon.com and other platforms as well.
	My channel is HR Report.
	So we have a lot more to talk about.
	You know, Gonzalo is a fascinating individual, and we get more into philosophy, world leaders and theories of the demise of Western culture and all kinds of fascinating issues.
	So don't miss that upcoming interview, roughly the second half of our conversation.
	You'll find it soon on brighteon.com.
	And thank you for tuning in today.
	It's super, super late for me.
	So I'm going to say goodnight, but I hope you enjoy this, and feel free to repost it on other platforms.
	You have our permission.
	Take care.
	Welcome, Mike Adams here.
	We're about to jump into the second half of the interview with Gonzalo Lira.
	Already received just a wave of positive feedback about the first half of the interview.
	A lot of people were really excited to hear this long-form format with Gonzalo and myself asking questions.
	There's a lot of information in that first hour.
	If you missed it, check it out on my channel, hrreportatbrighttown.com.
	Now, on to the interview, the second half with Gonzalo Lira.
	There is significant factions in the West that would demand and get a NATO escalation, and that could spiral out of control.
	And the Russians don't want that because they don't want a war.
	It's not that they're afraid of NATO. They're afraid of having a war because it will inevitably mean loss of life, destruction of all kinds of cities and all the rest of it.
	And they don't want that.
	And frankly, I find that the Russian attitude is far more humane than what the West is doing.
	And, you know, the proof is in the pudding, because ultimately, who is suffering now?
	Europeans.
	And soon enough, Americans.
	And I follow a lot of channels on YouTube of different people.
	Some have very big channels, some have microscopic channels of, you know, less than a thousand people who are talking about the situation on the ground in the United States and different regions of the United States.
	And they're all talking of the same thing.
	There aren't, you know, goods necessary, technologically sophisticated devices that are on order for months on end, and probably nobody's going to see them.
	I mean, you already see in the United States, things are going south in a big way.
	We have seen...
	Yes, Gonzalo, just want to add, in the last week, I have seen personally in Central Texas a very astonishing drop-off of consumer demand at restaurants and retail stores.
	And I spoke with some restaurant owners that I know and some retail workers, and I asked them, what's going on?
	Where is everybody?
	And literally, one of them said to me, well, they stopped showing up this week, and we think they've all run out of money.
	And I said, yeah, I think you're exactly right.
	You know, the stimulus money has run out and they're spending too much on food because of inflation and too much on energy, which in the U.S. energy is still a fraction of what it is in Germany or France or the U.K. And yet the Americans are running out of money.
	And we've seen those warnings, the Electrolux company in Europe warning, you know, they make appliances, warning they're shutting down partial operations because of a drop in demand all across Europe as well.
	Yeah, what's happening too is that the Biden administration is doing everything that it can to keep the status quo.
	And they're doing things that are very short-sighted.
	For instance, there are strategic petroleum reserves.
	They're hitting that one like a piggy bank, you know?
	And that's how they're trying to keep the prices of gasoline relatively low.
	And whenever the price of gas goes down a little bit, a few cents here and there, they're like, oh, see, it's a great victory for the Biden administration.
	But it's like taking a little bit of morphine to ease the suffering.
	Yeah, you feel all right for a little bit, but the pain is still there, and it's not going away anytime soon.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's incompetence.
	And here's something that I have a big disagreement with a lot of people, because a lot of people think that this is a controlled demolition, that this is a World Economic Forum, Great Reset Plan, stuff like that.
	I disagree.
	I think it's a stupidity.
	These people don't know what they're doing.
	Look, you had this Harbeck fellow in Germany.
	He's the Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economics.
	You know, he actually said, and this is the Minister of Economics here, he actually said that companies can shut down but keep on paying the workers.
	And I'm like, do you understand how basic economics work?
	Yeah, that's an interesting theory.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's fascinating if you're high on drugs and from Mars at the same time, because it doesn't make sense on this earth when you're sober.
	Because a company that shuts down, that doesn't produce anymore, it has to fire its workers.
	It can't afford them.
	It's as simple as that.
	What are you talking about?
	But these people live in fantasy land because they have never run a business.
	We collectively in the West decided that we were going to have this professional political class that has no experience in the real world.
	I mean, think of somebody like Harry Truman.
	Whatever you might think of Harry Truman.
	What was he?
	He was a haberdasher.
	And he got into politics.
	He was a small businessman, got into politics.
	Whenever he could, he would go back to Missouri, and he would interact with his people of his town.
	He knew their concerns, their priorities.
	He was president of the United States, eventually, but he was not detached from the people.
	Whereas the professional political class that we have today is completely detached from the people.
	They have no experience in the real world.
	They never ran a small business.
	Most of them have never been in the military.
	And they are making economic decisions, military decisions, without any kind of even baseline background that they can draw upon.
	That's correct.
	This notion that it's a great conspiracy and all the rest of it.
	Look, you and I, we have enough real world experience to know how difficult it is to get, say, six people to agree on some course of action.
	It's incredibly difficult.
	It's like wrangling cats, for crying out loud, you know?
	And so the notion that there's this big cabal, that they're all in lockstep, and this is part of a controlled demolition.
	I'm sorry, I don't buy it because I know how people are.
	And there's always somebody who disagrees, there's always somebody who doesn't want to go along with the program, and they can do some random other things that goes directly against this great plan that we've got that might even be sensible.
	And so the notion that there's a big cabal, no.
	But the notion that these people are idiots and that they have fed into each other's hysteria, that makes sense.
	Because you've seen a hysterical crowd.
	You've seen how people, all squeezed in together...
	They feed into each other's hysteria, and it becomes this spiral of hysteria, and they keep on doing stupid things that are destructive to themselves, let alone the people around them, because they get locked into this crazy-ass mindset.
	What happened at the very start of this conflict is that they wanted to destroy Russia, and they said, you know, no price is too high, and now they're stuck with this disease.
	This is the best news of the night, in my mind, because I would much rather that Western civilization be run by incompetent idiots who destroy themselves rather than evil globalists who destroy us.
	I agree, but here's the problem.
	See, these people are steering the car.
	That's the problem.
	Right.
	And we're in the backseat holding on for dear life.
	Exactly.
	Without airbags.
	And not only that, they are not going to listen to you.
	They're going to put like a screen between you, i.e.
	repressive measures, to make sure that you can't be a backseat driver telling them what to do because they know better.
	And by the mere fact that they're at the wheel, they think that just because of that, they actually know better.
	Right.
	Yeah, this is a bizarre combination of factors.
	Because it's very easy to believe, it seems to me, that there is a great conspiracy or a cabal because it gives you at least the comfort that there's a plan behind all of this.
	Because that's what happens.
	A lot of times people, especially when they are powerless, as the majority of the people in the West are, they're powerless.
	We're in the back seat.
	We can't do anything.
	A lot of times people who are powerless, and this has happened to me, we want to think that there's some power that actually has a plan, that we're actually going somewhere.
	Perhaps it's a place that we hate, that we don't want to go to, but at least they have a plan.
	But I'm sorry to say, from my experience, and I've been fortunate enough to interact with extraordinarily rich people, extraordinarily powerful people because of different business things that I've done and just various reasons.
	I can tell you, these people, they put their pants on one leg at a time, and for the most part, shockingly, they are not very smart.
	You think that they are.
	They're very ambitious, but they're surprisingly stupid and surprisingly locked into their mentality because they tend to repeat what worked for them before.
	Yes, that's right.
	Like sanctions.
	Yeah.
	Not even like sanctions, to give you a notion.
	When they impose sanctions on Iran, for instance, it hurts the Iranians, but the Western economies were not that exposed.
	So there was no harm to them, and it seemed that they were doing something.
	Do you see?
	Because a lot of times these leaders who are incompetent think that you have to do things to show that you're actually leading.
	Which is a great difference with Vladimir Putin.
	Putin is a very sharp customer because he has the nerve to many times realize that not doing something is the smarter move.
	And to give a specific example, a few years ago in the Syrian conflict, the Turks, Turkey, Erdogan's forces shot down a Russian fighter.
	And what did the Russians do?
	What did the Kremlin do?
	What did Putin do?
	Nothing.
	He didn't do anything.
	And you would have thought, he shot down, deliberately shot down a Russian fighter.
	And what did he do?
	He didn't do anything.
	He didn't burn any bridges.
	He didn't sanction Turkey or something like that.
	No, no, no.
	He just ignored it.
	Let it slide.
	And later, of course, because he had let this issue slide, he can negotiate with Erdogan and do all kinds of other things that are beneficial to his position, you see?
	But the Western leadership class feels that they have to do something in every circumstance.
	They always have to do one better than the opponent.
	Yes, like the West bombing the Chinese embassy in Kosovo in 1999, I think, whenever that was, and then saying, whoops, right, like you didn't mean to bomb the Chinese embassy.
	They always upped the ante.
	They never realized that sometimes a great leader has to not do anything, has to ignore something.
	They don't understand that.
	It's a peculiar mentality of Western leadership.
	They see some crisis and they say, we have to react.
	And in that reaction, you can get into much more trouble than if you just let it slide.
	Absolutely.
	Now, there's one more question I must ask you, and I think this is important for the context of where you are and the humanitarian side of your belief system and mine as well.
	But I just want to thank you in advance for taking all this time.
	You've spent way more time than I asked for.
	It's just so much fun.
	And like I said, I'm all yours because I've got nothing better to do with this.
	Everything is shut down, so I'm fine.
	I enjoy these conversations.
	And I should say, the one thing I miss since you have started the roundtable is that you do fewer of your own videos.
	And I miss those videos.
	I'm writing a book.
	That's why.
	Oh, really?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	And when I'm done with it, I'm going to hit you up.
	And you're going to have to promote it.
	I'm going to have to say, remember that time that I took all that time to talk to you?
	We'll come back.
	We'll have you back on.
	You owe me.
	Yeah, we'll have you back on.
	We'd love to talk about your book.
	Keep us posted about when that's going to be available.
	Yeah, I'm working on it diligently as hard as I can.
	That's why I haven't been posting videos.
	But I am doing the roundtables.
	Alright, excellent.
	So, yes, the question I want to ask you is about the people of Ukraine.
	Now, you live in Ukraine.
	You know a lot of Ukrainian people.
	I I know people, some people, not as many as you, but I know some people who live in Ukraine, in Kiev in particular, extraordinary individuals, loving families, good people, good humans.
	You and I care about the people of Ukraine.
	I know you do because we've spoken about this before.
	In your opinion, what is the best outcome to prevent suffering and to help the people of Ukraine?
	How can that ever happen?
	Okay, just before I answer that very good question, let me give a little background to your listeners so that they know why I'm in Ukraine.
	I mean, why is this Chilean slash American writer in Ukraine, right?
	And for a very simple reason.
	My wife is Ukrainian.
	I met her when I was living in Paris in the early 2010 and 2011, and she was the au pair of some college friends.
	And, you know, typical, we met, fell in love.
	We have a couple of kids.
	They're small.
	They're seven and nine.
	And so that's why I've been coming off and on to Ukraine since 2012.
	And I've been living here semi-permanently since 2016.
	I spent some time since 2016 in London and in Amsterdam because of business.
	But yeah, I have a permanent home in Kharkov, which is the region where my wife is from.
	And so, because there are some people who have slandered me saying that, oh, I'm like a sex tourist here in Ukraine.
	Not at all.
	You know, I mean, no, the reasons for my being here are not pernicious in any way.
	So that said, I just wanted to give that background so people understand who they're talking to.
	And I know Ukrainians because they're a family of my life.
	They're acquaintances I've come to know, business acquaintances I've come to know.
	And so that's my background.
	I don't hang out with the expat crowd here, because a lot of the expat crowd here are sexist or trying to score some Ukrainian girl because they're incredibly attractive.
	I mean, they really are.
	I mean, all the stereotype is true.
	Stereotypes are stereotypes because they tend to be true.
	And so anyway, I'm giving that background to answer your question.
	And your question stood my mind.
	Oh, how is this affecting the Ukrainian people?
	Yeah, and how do we help end the human suffering of the people of Ukraine?
	Well, the short answer is nobody can.
	I mean, it's too late for that.
	There was a huge exodus of people from Ukraine, mostly pro-Western educated Ukrainians, who fled to the West.
	And because of the rules that the Zelensky regime imposed that Military-aged men could not leave.
	That is, young men cannot leave.
	There has been a drain of women.
	And they have gone to Europe.
	And of course, what naturally happens, they find a place for themselves to live, a job of some sort.
	We've gone on seven months.
	Nobody's going to be unemployed for seven months waiting to come back to their country.
	And so they found places for themselves in the West.
	And they're not coming back.
	And it's estimated, credibly estimated, That of an original population of about 45 million people, at least 12 million have left.
	Wow.
	That's extraordinary.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, think of it, if you were the United States, it would be almost 100 million people leaving the United States.
	And so the Ukrainians who have left, a good three to four million left to Russia.
	And they've made their lives in Russia.
	They're going to continue to live there.
	And the remaining 8 million or so, 7 million or so, have gone to the West, principally to Poland, but all spread out throughout Europe.
	They're not coming back.
	It's as simple as that.
	And they're not coming back.
	Here in Kharkov, I arrived here.
	I was in Kiev at the start of the special military operation because I happened to be there on business.
	I arrived the night before the start of this war.
	And I spent a week there, and then I came down here on the 1st of March, and I've been here ever since.
	And in March, Kharkov was a ghost town.
	And more people have come back.
	The people who have come back are ethnic Russians.
	Now, this whole region, be they ethnic Ukrainians or ethnic Russians, they all speak Russian.
	So they're not going to have any kind of problem reintegrating themselves into Russian society if Russia were to eventually, as I believe they will, take over this city and this whole region.
	And so my thinking is that the The Ukraine, as it was known, is gone forever.
	It's never coming back.
	Because all these territories that the Russians have captured, they're going to hold on to them.
	And they're going to increase their territorial gains, inevitably, as they chase the Zelensky regime forces and wind up annihilating all of them to a man.
	And so they are going to take over a huge chunk of this country.
	And what remains of it, this rump Ukraine state, the Russians will make sure that the government in charge will be extremely friendly to Russia, much like the Lukashenko regime in Belarus is to Russia.
	Yes.
	It'll be a satellite state.
	It'll be a buffer state.
	That's what the Russians wanted.
	They wanted a buffer state.
	They did not want NATO on its doorstep, on its borders.
	And they were willing to put up with the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, because for several reasons.
	Number one, they're fairly small.
	And the geography is such that Russia could sweep in instantly and take it over in like an afternoon, because it's very small.
	When you look at a map, it seems larger than it actually is.
	But when you look at a globe, Yeah, it's because of the map distortions right up north, yeah.
	Yeah.
	You see how small these countries really are.
	They could dig it over in the afternoon.
	I mean, all of that territory of those three nations is less than half of what they took over, the Russians took over on the first day of operations here in Ukraine.
	Okay, and there's that factor, number one.
	The second factor is that half the population of those republics are ethnic Russians, right?
	And so there's that.
	And third reason is that those countries are indefensible by NATO. Because of the geography and how they're situated, and the fame folded gap, there is no way that NATO could defend those three countries if Russia decided to take them over.
	Geographically, it's not an issue of will or manpower or ship power.
	It's just geography.
	There is simply no way that they could defend it.
	And so, because of these three factors, the Russians were fine with the Baltic states being part of NATO because it meant nothing.
	It was a fig leaf.
	But they weren't willing to have it in Ukraine.
	So they are not going to let that happen.
	The rump Ukraine state that remains, which part of it might ward on Russia, well, that rump Ukraine state is going to be a satellite state.
	This is the direction of travel.
	How long this will take?
	It might take a few months.
	It might take a couple of years.
	But it's going to happen.
	There would be a state without the southern ports and without Odessa, obviously.
	Yeah.
	Because Odessa, for those of you who don't know, Odessa is a very important historical and religious city to the Russians.
	And so there are two things I know about Odessa.
	Number one, they are not going to assault the city and level it.
	Never.
	They would never do that because of these long-standing historical and religious ties to Russia.
	Number one.
	Number two, it will become part of Russia.
	Inevitably.
	There is nothing that NATO or the angels or the aliens can do to stop that.
	They are going to take it over.
	It's just going to be a matter of time.
	This slow road grinding process that they are embarked on.
	And any kind of setback that the Russians experience, like this offensive in Kupkov, You have to look at the context overall.
	Is it an actual setback?
	Did they actually lose?
	Or did they, in fact, kind of like win?
	My estimation is that, to come back, to circle back in the famous phrase of Jen Psaki, to circle back to the original start of this conversation, The Kharkov Offensive achieved Russian goals, and it achieved relatively little to improve the situation of Ukraine in terms of territory gain.
	And in terms of loss of men and equipment, it was a catastrophe.
	I mean, it really was.
	And there's no other way to look at it if you look at it cold-bloodedly, unemotionally, realistically.
	If you buy into the propaganda, it was a great Ukrainian victory.
	And if the Zelensky regime has more of these fantastic victories, the Russian army is going to be marching in Kiev by the end of the year.
	So, you know, the Zelensky regime cannot afford more of these great victories, but apparently they are embarked on another couple of offensives in Zaporozhye.
	And the Russians are preparing.
	They set up the Third Army Corps In Rostov-on-Don, which is a city on the very end of the Sea of Azov.
	When you look at the map, you see Crimea, which is an insula jutting into the Black Sea.
	To the immediate right of it, to the east of it, right in the crook of it, is the city of Rostov-on-Don.
	And that's where they assembled this huge army, the Third Army Corps.
	And they've deployed those men to reinforce the southern front and They're going to take the offensive, and they're going to make the ministry out of it, like they did before, like they did in Kharkov.
	This is the danger of believing your own PR. You start doing things that are extremely damaging to your own cause, instead of doing the right thing, which is negotiating, which is ending this conflict.
	But as I said, It's too late.
	The Russians will not believe any attempt to negotiate.
	The Russians have said outright that they will not have any kind of meeting between Zelensky and Putin to end this conflict.
	They're just not going to.
	And on top of that, they don't even believe that Zelensky is the real power in Ukraine.
	They are under no illusions.
	They know that this war is being run out of the U.S. State Department.
	They know it.
	And so they're not going to talk to Zonstein.
	They know he is literally an actor because he actually is an actor.
	And in this conflict, he is a puppet.
	And you don't negotiate with a puppet.
	You negotiate with a puppet master.
	And the Americans, because of their hubris, their pride, they are never going to roll back, let alone negotiate with the Russians.
	And so this conflict is going to grind on.
	And so the people of Ukraine are going to suffer.
	And the people who are in the occupied areas...
	I see the videos.
	Everybody's seen the videos.
	The Russians have come in strong with Yes, right.
	You don't hear about it.
	Yeah, you know why?
	Because if you see video now coming out of Mariupol right now, they have rebuilt half the city.
	They are rebuilding it from the ground up.
	And everybody who lost an apartment, you know, an apartment building that got completely obliterated by artillery and whatnot, they leveled it and rebuilt it with remarkable speed.
	And, of course, the Russians, you know, they do their own propaganda, and they show these videos of, like, you know, some...
	Some elderly lady and her daughter and granddaughter.
	And here are the keys, madam.
	This is your new apartment.
	That's beautiful.
	It's got all the modern conveniences and it's freshly painted.
	I mean, brand new.
	You see the opera house.
	You see the hospitals.
	You see all the stuff in Mariupol that seemed to have been destroyed.
	The Russians are rebuilding it because they've got the money because of the sanctions.
	Yeah.
	But another key is that that woman this winter in Mariupol, she'll be able to afford her electricity bill while the wealthy Parisians or Berlin residents will be dying from starvation and exposure because they can't pay their own bills.
	I was even having a conversation with someone I know who lives in Kiev.
	I said, would you rather be in Kiev this winter or would you rather be in Paris?
	I'd rather be in Kiev because we can go to the countryside and all the traditional homes, they have wood stoves in them.
	We can heat.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And on top of that, the Kiev residents won't have to worry because the Russians are going to cut off their gaps.
	Because again, they have no intention of harming the civilians.
	All this talk that civilians are suffering, no, no.
	They only suffered because the Zelensky regime placed its forces right next to apartment buildings.
	You have to keep in mind, all the structures here in Ukraine, they're built like fortresses.
	They are big cinder blocks, but not like the hollow ones.
	They're like big bricks, you know?
	The whole place is built like that.
	It's built like a fortress.
	And that's why the Zelensky Radium forces would hide in industrial zones.
	Like, for instance, in Mariupol.
	Why were they all in the Azov steelworks?
	Well, because that thing is like a fortress.
	It was built in Soviet times to withstand a nuclear blast.
	So it is de facto a fortress.
	People ask, why is the Russian offensive in the Donbass taking so long?
	Well, because that area is heavily industrialized.
	When you look at a map, not just a blank map, but like a geomap like Google Earth, You see that area, that it's heavily industrialized with all of these buildings of various sorts.
	That area in Ukraine, by the way, a little tidbit that's useful to know, the Donbass region, the territories that Russia has captured, the Donbass, Kherson, all that, that represented 85% of Ukraine's GDP. Oh, I did not know that.
	85%.
	Yeah, that's a little tidbit that people don't talk about very much, because that area was the industrialized zone of Ukraine.
	And also, it happens to have the best farmland.
	And so the reason it's been the slow grind from the point of view of the Russians is that the Ukrainians have heavily fortified that area, and there is a natural fortification of all of these buildings.
	And so that's why it's a slow-growing process.
	It takes time to, you know, shell the enemy forces, whoever is their enemy.
	If they are in a fortified position, it takes a while to shell them with artillery fires and airstrikes.
	Until they finally start pulling back or they've been so substantially reduced that you can send in your infantry to take over that territory.
	It's not something like in the movies.
	In a movie, the war is over in two hours because it's a movie.
	But in the real war, it takes weeks and months.
	And so it's not surprising at all.
	That it's taken the Russians this long to grind through all of these fortifications and all these defenses.
	Either actually purpose-built fortifications, which the Ukraine side, the Zelensky regime, and the Poroshenko regime before it was doing for the past eight years because they anticipated this war.
	Everybody knew this war was coming, by the way.
	And the natural fortifications of these apartment buildings, these hospitals, and all these areas have been cleared out.
	I mean, the civilians are long gone.
	They left ages ago.
	And so when they say, oh my God, they destroyed a hospital.
	No, they destroyed a hospital which had weeks or months before been abandoned.
	Yeah, not a hospital full of patients.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's been taken over by Zelensky regime forces.
	There are videos on Telegram channels all over the place where you see Zelensky regime forces hanging out in kindergarten classrooms with the decorations of the little kids and all.
	Do you see a child anywhere nearby or a teacher?
	No, they're all gone.
	Long gone.
	And so it's just PR. So anyway, it takes a while to grind through.
	But the big line, the last speed bump is going to be a town called Kramatorsk.
	Once they overrun that, that is really going to be the end of the war, the war as far as the Donbass is concerned.
	And you have to keep in mind, after Kramatorsk, it's flat cow country.
	And it's indefensible.
	And so that's going to be the big turning point.
	And that will happen in the next month or two.
	And then we're going to see a serious action.
	And a final point insofar as the military issue is concerned.
	A lot of people say, oh, in winter you can't fight.
	That's weird.
	What about 1943?
	Last I heard, snow was not some magic fairy dust that would destroy a tank.
	I never heard that.
	That's new to me.
	It's snow, cold, these guys are prepared.
	Okay, so it's people don't know what they're talking about.
	Yeah, well, I mean, the Russians have proven again and again they can fight in the winter.
	In fact, they can fight vastly superior militarized forces effectively in the winter.
	And what's really interesting is I would recommend people check out a guy called Larry Johnson.
	He's got a website called Sonar-21.
	He's a former CIA analyst, and he's a dissident.
	He doesn't buy the narrative at all.
	He looks at things realistically, and he's a very, very smart customer.
	And he has this website, sonar21.com, where he has these daily blog posts, and he talks about the misperceptions of the West insofar as this conflict is concerned.
	And I highly recommend it.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, great.
	Well, we'll check that out.
	And finally, I want to recommend your channel again.
	Also, Gonzalo Lira, that's L-I-R-A, the second, or I-I. I'm sorry, I have trouble figuring out the best way to describe that.
	But, folks, that's Gonzalo's channel on YouTube.
	And, Mr.
	Lira, I just want to thank you.
	It's always fascinating speaking with you.
	And you've taken a tremendous amount of time.
	This has been highly informative.
	I can't think of enough.
	I don't even know how long we've been going.
	It's been an hour and a half, actually.
	Really?
	Wow.
	Yes, yes.
	I talk a lot.
	I mean, it doesn't seem that long to me either, because I still have questions for you, but I tell you what.
	Look, why don't you hit me up with that?
	I mean, like, in for a penny, in for a pound.
	I'm perfectly fine to go.
	I've got coffee that'll last me most of the morning, so I'm good.
	I've got coffee and cigarettes, so keep on trucking, man.
	What other thing is on your mind?
	I'm curious.
	Okay, all right.
	Well, if you don't mind, then let me ask you something else on my list.
	Let me bring in, let me play devil's advocate for a second about the Western narrative.
	So for those listening, the Western narrative hyperventilating in the Western press has been that this counteroffensive by Ukraine has shown that Russia has been defeated already and that the Ukrainian forces are very close to the Russian border and that as a result, oh, and by the way, the assumption is that What has happened is Russia's best effort, like Russia's running at 100% with the best troops, the best equipment, the best missile systems.
	This is the best they can do.
	And then the theory is then that because of this frustrating failure, Putin is going to lash out in an irrational way.
	And the world needs to make sure that Putin doesn't do something crazy at this point because he's been so defeated.
	That's the narrative.
	Even on Fox News, by the way.
	Yeah.
	Totally wrong.
	Totally incorrect.
	I mean, incorrect on all kinds of ways.
	They don't even realize what's really going on in the Donbass, because the Donbass is the eastern area, right?
	And people are under the assumption that it's Russian troops that are fighting.
	It's actually not.
	And this is going to be something that a lot of people are not going to quite understand.
	But you see, the soldiers, most of the soldiers, not all, But most of the soldiers that are fighting in the Donbass are not Russian soldiers.
	The Russians are providing artillery, air support, intelligence, command and control.
	The actual soldiers fighting are the Donbass militia, the actual Russian army.
	People are starting to realize this.
	I mean, this isn't commented because it hasn't been obvious and sometimes hard to figure out.
	But it seems that what has happened is in the Donbass and Mariupol, it was mostly DPR, that is Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic militiamen, who have been doing the actual that is Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic militiamen, who have been doing They're the ones who have been bearing the brunt of the fighting.
	In the Kursov front and the Zaporozhye front, that has been Russian military, Russian army.
	OK, because they came out of Crimea and they're professional contract soldiers.
	They're top of the line people.
	I mean, people you do not want to mess with.
	OK, but in the Donbass, the soldiers who are on the ground actually fighting are for the most part DPR and LPR militiamen.
	And also, the Russians have very cleverly, it seems to me, used what's known as a Wagner Group, after the composer Richard Magner.
	The Wagner Group, which are basically military contractors that the Russians have.
	And also Chechen fighters.
	Okay?
	Now, it's very interesting.
	There's been a lot of commentary about this.
	And this might be a minutia, but your audience might be interested in this.
	See, the Wagner group, it seems, because this is kind of shadowy and the Russians don't put out press releases about them, It seems that they are basically former Russian soldiers and also soldiers from other places in the Russian territory, because they're not just ethnic Russians.
	They're from different ethnicities in Russia, because Russia is a huge country.
	It has all kinds of ethnicities, right?
	Muslims and whatnot.
	The Chechen fighters are Muslim.
	And so what the Wagner group seems to be is the equivalent of the French Foreign Legion, okay, or the equivalent of the British Sikh fighters.
	These guys are razors.
	I mean, they are razors.
	These guys are tough, hardened soldiers.
	A lot of combat experience in different places.
	And it seems that the Russians use them as what's known as a stiffening agent.
	You know when you have a wheel that's made out of carbon fiber, but you put a little bit of tin in the middle of it and it stiffens it.
	It's like rebar.
	Concrete on its own is fairly brittle.
	But if you put steel rods in it, it becomes impenetrable.
	And the steel by itself, it's fairly strong, but it's just a little stick.
	But if it's surrounded by concrete, it's incredibly hard.
	That's how they're using the Wagner Group.
	That's how they're using the Chechen fighters.
	The Chechen fighters are nobody to mess with.
	Okay, they are tough hombres, right?
	And so that's the force that they've been using in the Donbass.
	And that should scare anybody, because these guys know what they're doing.
	And so consistently, you start seeing that in the Donbass region, when there's an attack, it's usually led by Chechen fighters or the Wagner group.
	And these guys are the tip of the spear.
	And they are extremely effective.
	And to go back to the main point, is that, see, for the Russians, this has been a fairly reduced operation in terms of manpower.
	It's hard to believe.
	But they haven't used that many troops of their own.
	And the troops that they have used, they've concentrated them in Kherson and Zaporozhyeh, the south of the country.
	Rather than in the east, in the Donbass region.
	And this is something that's really interesting because all of a sudden you start to realize, hey, then the Russians have a lot more troops in reserve and their casualties, the Russian casualties, the Russian army casualties, are fairly low.
	The Russians, after this offensive, like, as I said at the beginning, insofar as the Kharkov offensive, they had pulled out the majority of their people there because the Izium position, it was no longer tenable.
	It was pointless to hold it.
	And so they pulled back.
	They had maybe 1,000, 2,000 troops that weren't even troops, combat troops.
	They were basically military police.
	And they annihilated the Ukraine offensive to the tune of 4,000 dead, perhaps twice that number of incapacitated And so they're doing it on the cheap.
	And so the Russians are not desperate at all.
	And the notion that Vladimir Putin is going to panic, first of all, he's not a guy who panics.
	You don't get to be the president of Russia with all the internal politics going on and all these things.
	Intrigue and whatnot.
	You never get to be the president for 20-odd years if you panic.
	That guy doesn't panic.
	He doesn't panic over anything.
	And so the notion that he's panicking because of this great loss, it's laughable.
	Because number one, there was no great loss.
	They lost territory, big deal.
	Like you said before, on a chessboard, you're happy to give up some squares here and there if you're taking out the pieces of your opponent.
	And that's what happened.
	And so he's not panicking.
	It's the West that's panicking.
	And this is something very interesting because you start to realize that most of the time, it's the West that is projecting onto the Russians their own fears, their own frustrations, their own panic, because they're panicking.
	And with good reason, because they screwed the pooch.
	Yes, yes, exactly.
	And we've seen that again and again throughout this conflict.
	Now, I'm going to ask to wrap it up here just out of the interest of our listeners, too, but I want to make sure that we have you back, especially as your book comes to fruition.
	Are you able to share a title yet, or is it too early for that?
	It's a little too early for that.
	But it's not about the war.
	It's not about the war.
	It's a separate issue, but it ties into the war.
	The ultimate reasons for the war.
	Because I've...
	I'll delve into a little personal background.
	I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or like I'm full of myself.
	I mean, I am full of myself, but not that full of myself, okay?
	So, if I may indulge in the patience of both you and your audience.
	I was fortunate enough to be raised in a fairly well-to-do background, and I was expected to go to the best universities and get a solid position in leadership class.
	I did.
	I went to an Ivy League university.
	I went to Dartmouth.
	I had opportunities to be part of the program.
	I was offered a position at Goldman Sachs back in the day.
	Wow.
	And, yeah, I could have done that life, but instead I decided to be a writer in Hollywood, and then I published some novels, and then I just went into business for myself.
	And I made a very decent living, but I had the opportunity to know a lot of people of the leadership class, because a lot of the people of the leadership class have my background.
	Or I have their background.
	I know more or less where they're coming from.
	And so what I'm writing is this extended...
	It's actually a series of books.
	It's four books.
	And one of them is about the leadership class.
	The leadership class in the West.
	And the causes of why they are detached from the people.
	And one of the things that I want to emphasize is that the leadership class doesn't have anything in common with the common people of the West.
	They don't understand them.
	And in fact, they view them as inferior.
	They view them as people without the right credentials.
	And this leadership class, they live by credentialism.
	By having the right credential from the right university.
	One of the things that frustrates them a great deal is that they can't dismiss me because I went to an Ivy League school.
	I have their background.
	I'm not an idiot.
	I'm not that big of an idiot.
	You know what I mean?
	And so they are totally sealed off from the people.
	And they view the people of the West much like...
	Colonizers.
	Like conquerors.
	Like occupiers.
	And they're afraid of the people.
	You have to understand that.
	Because they view the people with contempt.
	Because they do.
	I've seen it.
	I've seen their attitudes.
	And we all have.
	The attitude of the leadership class.
	And I'm not talking about the political leadership class.
	I'm talking about the entire leadership class.
	The entire leadership cadre of the Western democracies.
	The people in industry.
	The people in the C-suites.
	The people in media.
	The people in our entertainments.
	They view the people with contempt.
	They look down upon them.
	And at the same time, and this is key, they're afraid of them.
	Never forget that.
	They are very afraid of people.
	Because one of the things that really scares them is the fact that the United States, the people of the United States, are so heavily armed.
	I mean, everybody's got a gun, which makes complete sense because, you know, North American continent was an open continent, you know, and you needed to have a gun.
	And so the, not merely the tradition, but the need to have a weapon has always been there.
	I was in Alaska one time, years ago.
	I spent a lot of time in Alaska.
	Driving around, I went everywhere.
	I went to Dead Horse on the far northern shore of Alaska, Anchorage, Fairbanks, the whole kit and caboodle.
	And the thing is, even the most leftist guy out in Alaska was heavily armed because there were bears.
	He needed them, right?
	And so the point is that the Western leadership class is terrified of the people and terrified especially of the American armed population.
	Yeah.
	And so what I believe is going to happen, and we're seeing this, is repression.
	Repression on an unprecedented scale.
	And there's something else too that people don't seem to realize that they ought to be paying attention to, is that the police forces in most of the United States, they are not representative of the people.
	In fact, they are paid by the federal government.
	You'd be surprised if you start looking into the details of how the police forces are financed.
	And they're financed by federal grants, federal monies.
	And ultimately, you owe your allegiance to whoever assigns your paycheck.
	And the local police forces, the professional police forces in the United States, for the most part, they're not even from that area.
	They're hired from away, and they move to the town to police it.
	And so they don't have any point of contact with people.
	So people in the United States ought to understand that your local police, they're not your friends.
	They are federal law enforcement in all but name.
	Mm-hmm.
	And that is deliberate, because they are afraid of the people.
	That's something that a lot of people, hardworking, decent people, who have not had any exposure to these elites, does not understand, but should internalize, of how afraid they really are of the people.
	We've seen recently Homeland Security and Mayorkas, who's the chief of that, saying that anybody who doesn't agree with the government is a, quote, extremist.
	So if you disagree with any narrative, he says if you get narratives off the internet that contradict official narratives, then you're an extremist.
	That's exactly what you're talking about.
	But I always ask, well, Which government narrative should we believe today?
	And which government of the world?
	The narrative of Belgium?
	It's the narrative of the day.
	Yes.
	Who can keep track?
	You've got to believe the lie that they tell you every morning.
	If yesterday you said that the sky is green and today they say the sky is purple, you've got to tell the lie, man, or else it's true.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	These people are like that, okay?
	But you have to understand something that people who have not had exposure to the leadership classes do not understand, and it's the following.
	Number one, they are not particularly smart in the ways that matter.
	They might have high IQ points.
	They might speak several languages.
	Many do.
	They're not stupid in the sense of being dum-dums, of being, you know, sub 100 IQ points.
	No, no, no.
	A lot of these people are very, very smart.
	But the thing is, see, they don't have judgment because they have not had any life experience.
	They've only had the experience of being in this leadership bubble that's separated from the rest of the people.
	And so they're afraid of them because we're always afraid of those things that we are unfamiliar with.
	And so they are afraid of the common people.
	What has led them to success is not sticking out and saying something that goes against the flow of everybody else.
	No.
	They've gotten ahead by doing what everybody else is doing.
	And I can give you a specific example, which is really interesting.
	For various reasons, I've had to deal with hedge funds.
	Sometimes I put money with hedge funds back when I was running money, but that's not important for this conversation.
	What's important is that, see, these hedge funds, right?
	If you look down and drill down at their investment strategies, they're almost all identical.
	Now, the people who run these hedge funds, they all come from this leadership class.
	I call it the ziggurat, you know, the stepped pyramid of different civilizations.
	Because what it is, is that, see, in a ziggurat, you start at the bottom, and you have to climb the steep side of it until you get to, like, a plateau.
	And you think of like, for instance, the first step that you have to get up is be the good boy in high school, in private high school, better yet, and get the good grades and climb that very steep ladder until you get to the first plateau, which is getting into the quote-unquote good college.
	And you're on that plateau for a while with other people like you.
	And then after that, you want to go up the next step, which is also equally steep, to your first career, whatsoever it is.
	So you work as an assistant in some business or some drone in an office somewhere to learn the ropes of the business, but it's really just showing people that you comply.
	And you get to that second step up where you have a solid career, whatsoever that career may be.
	And then there's another one if you want to have leadership positions in political power or corporate power.
	It's a series of steep inclines and then plateaus.
	Think of it like that.
	Now, how do you get up these plateaus?
	You obey.
	You comply.
	You obey.
	You comply.
	You do what everybody else is doing.
	When I would talk to these various hedge funds, I would meet them like 3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon to have them pitch me whatever strategy they had.
	Ultimately, it was the same strategy.
	They all had the same strategy.
	And you know why?
	They didn't want to deviate from one another.
	They actually asked me what the other hedge funds were, their basic strategy was.
	They wanted to know that they were doing what everybody else was doing.
	So if they screwed up, they could say, oh, well, everybody else was doing it, so that's why I was doing it.
	They would rather fail as a group than be individually successful but be alone.
	You see what's going on, the mentality of it.
	And they are failing as a group of nations.
	Yes, exactly.
	They're lemmings.
	That's amazing.
	I insist people don't understand this.
	There is a difference between intelligence and independent judgment.
	They are not the same thing.
	You can be a very stupid person in terms of IQ, just not very clever, but have very good judgment.
	You can be very uneducated and have very good commonsensical judgment.
	But this leadership, this ziggurat, it does not reward people for having independent judgment.
	It rewards people for complying and jumping through all these hoops.
	And these hoops, you need to be very smart to jump through the hoop, okay?
	But you don't have to have particular judgment.
	In fact, it disincentivizes independent judgment.
	And morals as well.
	You don't need morality.
	Well, it's not only that.
	See, the morality, and that's one of the essays.
	One of the essays is called Ethics, which is precisely this issue.
	You see, morality comes from complying to the expectations and the beliefs of your collective group, whatsoever that collective group may be.
	So if you're one of the people in this leadership class in New York City, or in Washington, or in Palo Alto in California, Your morality, what you consider good, what you consider evil, is what the people around you consider good or consider evil.
	I mean, think of it in these terms.
	See, back in Mesopotamia, you know, the Aztecs, they would do these human sacrifices, right?
	And we think that's horrible.
	It's horrible to, you know, split somebody's chest open and devour their still beating heart at the top of the temple.
	We think that that's insane, right?
	But there were hundreds of thousands of people watching this, and they all thought it was great.
	I mean, look at Apocalypto, the Mel Gibson movie, right?
	Why did everybody think that this was fine?
	Because it was their belief system.
	Their belief system, you know, led them to conclude that sacrificing, you know, enemies or slaves or whomever was good because it would curry favor with the gods.
	And everybody cheered when the high priest would devour the still beating heart of some poor guy that they captured, right?
	And why is that?
	Why did they have that morality?
	Why didn't 100,000 people surround that pyramid and cheer on when this barbarity was taking place?
	Because they all shared that belief system.
	See?
	That collective shared that belief system, which we today, 500 years later, think is horrifying.
	The leadership class, they have a separate and distinct morality from the common people of the United States.
	That's why you have this woke nonsense.
	You and I think that it's crazy.
	It's just nonsense.
	But they think it's good.
	Because all of them share this belief system of wokeness and all the rest of it.
	Critical race theory, and that it's perfectly fine to transition five-year-old children.
	We don't let five-year-old children decide what to eat.
	But we're perfectly fine with allowing them to decide their gender.
	I mean, come on, that's insane.
	But just as insane as it is to have a human sacrifice and devour somebody's heart for the sake of bringing a good harvest next spring.
	Well, actually, it has more in common than you might suppose, because they both involve mutilating children.
	Yes.
	Well said.
	Yes, exactly right.
	You see my point.
	Their morality is distinct from the morality of the people they are leading.
	And so they are willing to make the people suffer because they don't think that they are doing evil.
	This is something that you've got to get into your head.
	They don't think that they are doing a bad thing.
	They think that what they're doing is the way things ought to be done.
	And that's why it's going to be impossible or extremely difficult to get rid of these people.
	Because they don't think that they're doing anything wrong.
	And so when they see resistance, they view the resistance as evil.
	When Joe Biden gave his famous, you know, Dark Lord of the Sith speech, you know what I'm talking about?
	Yeah.
	When he gave that speech, he basically declared half the population were evil, were enemies of the state.
	He was sincere.
	Or the people who wrote that speech were sincere.
	I mean, the old man is so senile.
	He doesn't know which end is up and where he is.
	But the people who wrote that speech, they believe that.
	And they're sincere in their beliefs.
	They truly believe this.
	They all believe this.
	This is something that people have to understand.
	The common people, the working people, They truly believe that the lower socioeconomic classes in the United States are separate people, that they are contemptible, but they're afraid of them because, of course, there are more of them.
	And you have to understand where these people are coming from.
	Their highest value is to comply with the social expectations that their class has.
	And that's why, for instance, you have so many movies.
	When I started in the movie business, right, back in the mid-90s, I would write some script or whatever, and my aim was to write scripts that would appeal to people.
	And the people buying these scripts had the same notion.
	But what has happened is the professionalization of screenwriting with all these MFA programs.
	And so what happens is that Hollywood studios and production companies will hire somebody who has an MFA degree, a credential, because they no longer have independent judgment.
	They don't know how to judge the worth of a screenplay.
	So they'll hire some MFA buffoon.
	And because of their credential, they'll assume, oh, this script is good.
	And the script is full of this woke nonsense because that's what they're teaching at universities and masters of fine arts programs that teach screenwriting.
	And by the way, screenwriting, I can tell you as a professional writer, that was the first job I had, right?
	It's a craft.
	It's like carpentry.
	You don't get good by going to school for carpentry.
	You get good by doing a lot of carpentry, okay?
	It's...
	Yeah, it's with words rather than wood, but it's the same process.
	It's practice.
	Practice makes perfect, but a credential does not make you good.
	And in fact, a credential will make you do, you will be forced to comply with your teacher to get the good grade.
	And so you will write things that will not appeal to people, to the mass of people, but will appeal to the same class, the woke class.
	Yes.
	And, of course, the critics...
	How did the critics get their job as a critic?
	Well, because they had the right credential from the right degree.
	You see?
	They complied and got the right degree.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You see how it works?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But the rest of us watching the movie are freaking out.
	Like, how are they depicting this?
	This is insane.
	And, by the way, every action...
	Well, I was even...
	Every action hero now has to be a dainty, tiny woman with a 20-inch waist, but she knows jujitsu and firearms and rocket launchers, and she can beat up Navy SEALs.
	Effortlessly.
	While there's always a man standing around who's useless.
	Her pal guy, a useless, typically white man, is saying, you know, save me, woman!
	Basically, every film is like that now.
	It's bizarre.
	Exactly right.
	And of course, it's not true.
	I mean, there are videos of like some MMA fighter who's like, I mean, he's a tough guy, right?
	And he's like 5'7", 5'8".
	But I mean, tough as steel, right?
	But he goes up against a 6'4", fat guy who has no training whatsoever.
	A fat guy just literally bumps him with his belly and sends him flying.
	Yeah, of course, because there's a reason that in boxing, you have different weight classes.
	Right.
	Size matters, yes.
	Yeah, size matters.
	You know, like quantity has a quality all its own, in Joseph Stalin's famous phrase.
	Yeah, and the thing is, these movies have these unrealistic expectations of women, and women internalize this notion.
	And so you see these women, these videos of, you know, home, not home videos, but, you know, random videos from eyewitnesses of some dainty little woman who thinks that she can beat up some guy who's like six inches taller than her and has at least 100 pounds on her.
	Right.
	And...
	And we're supposed to believe that.
	And he, of course, with one wave sense of flying, of course, you know.
	But the woman has internalized a reality that's not real.
	It's a narrative that is not real.
	And it gets her in danger.
	I mean, I saw this recently.
	There was some stuffle out on the sidewalk somewhere.
	And some very attractive, very skinny and small woman got into the mix of this.
	And one of the men who was there was a bigger guy.
	She knocked her head.
	I mean, clearly, she was damaged.
	I mean, she was personally injured severely.
	And the guy didn't even try to hit her.
	He just flung her aside.
	And she went flying.
	And who was injured there because of this lack of realism?
	The poor woman, because she was foolish enough.
	To get involved in a street fight of some sort.
	I don't know what the kerfuffle was.
	Apparently her boyfriend was getting into a tussle and whatever.
	And she stuck her nose in there.
	She got seriously injured because she did not have a realistic appraisal of her own limitations.
	She had bought into this thing.
	This is symptomatic of all of Western culture.
	This happens in finance, this happens in government, and so on.
	But I'm waiting for the woke remake of Rambo.
	It will be starring a transgender.
	It'll be called Mambo.
	It's Mam, you know, and she'll have a bow, and it'll be kicking ass as a transgender.
	I'm sure that's coming.
	Yeah, of course.
	How can I put it?
	All of this underscores the irreality, the detachment from reality of the leadership class.
	And, you know, there's also something else, too.
	Just to go back to entertainment, I mean, that's where I started out from.
	You know, in entertainment, like you said, the woman who knows everything and knows all the answers and is so calm and cool and collected, which is completely unreal, and the man who is useless and Now, that notion of the man being useless, it percolates.
	And people always talk about the incels, right?
	The incels are evil, blah, blah, blah.
	And I tend to view the incels and Antifa as two signs of the same coin.
	And hear me out.
	Because Antifa and the incels, they are men, young men.
	But are completely disenfranchised from mainstream society.
	And they've been told repeatedly that a woman can do anything that he can do, that he is nothing special, that he is a fool, he's just excess baggage, he has no worth.
	And so the incels wind up staring at their computer screens, looking at Pornhub videos obsessively and doing, you know, an onamistic existence, which is just pathetic.
	And they're stuck there and they're just feeding on their resentment.
	Whereas the Antifa are equally resentful, but they express their resentment by way of violence.
	And violence and let's not kill ourselves, you know, the whole BLM thing and all of those riots.
	It was very clear that the Democratic National Committee cynically used these Antifa kids who are lost and misguided and semi-brainwashed to be the shock troops for repression and mayhem and chaos that would benefit them.
	And so I think that a lot of the attention directed towards incels is somehow a collective realization that Incels represent a potential army of opposition against Antifa.
	That's why there's so much hatred towards incels, you know?
	And look at what incels are, the name.
	Involuntary celibate.
	That is, he is not sexually successful.
	The young man who's not sexually successful, he's not socially successful.
	He's not a part of the mainstream culture.
	He's alienated.
	And there's this, you know, like he's evil.
	He's an evil guy.
	I mean, I used to do videos as Coach Red Pill.
	And I've gotten a lot of flack for that because they said it was all about pickup artistry and seducing girls and simply manipulating them.
	No, my videos are all about giving the practical advice to young men to get on with their lives insofar as having a successful social life.
	I mean, one of my most popular videos, for instance, It was a video on how to tip, you know, how to give a gratuity.
	Not just the mechanics of giving the gratuity, but whom should you give a gratuity to?
	And it was a 20-minute video about that, about tipping, okay?
	The whole point of that channel was I was trying to make videos for young men because the origin of the channel, of the videos, is that I'm 54 and my son is seven years old.
	And I figured that by the time he was in his late 20s, 30s, when he would need good advice from an adult, I would be either senile like Joe Biden or just dead, you know, just out of old age or whatever.
	And so I did these videos and they garnered an audience and I got 300,000 subscribers.
	Like a time capsule for your kid.
	That's awesome.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And it was practical advice.
	Like, one of the videos I did was I discussed, you know, never give a personal loan.
	Because if you give a personal loan, inevitably, you'll wind up, you know, having a fight with that friend or family member, and you'll never talk again.
	It'll be a big disaster.
	And I used a case of my own.
	I went with 20 grand to a cousin of my mother's.
	It was a big disaster, you know?
	That's the kind of advice I gave.
	And of course, rather than that, they said, oh, it was all about picking up girls.
	I did do videos about girls, but not about picking them up.
	I was telling them, for instance, don't date a single mother, for instance, if you're a young single guy, because you're going to take on all this additional responsibility that is beyond your purview.
	And what happens if you grow attached to the child of your girlfriend, who's a single mother, and you break up with the girlfriend?
	You've never seen that boy or girl ever again that you've grown attached to because we naturally grow attached to children that are around us because it's part of human nature.
	We want to look after the little kid and make sure that he's okay and all the rest of it.
	I'm not talking about anything perverted or anything.
	I'm not Jeffrey Epstein kind of stuff.
	No, just fatherly type of positive influence for...
	Growth, exactly.
	And I explained why for a single guy with no kids of their own, it was a disaster.
	You know, you should never do that.
	And, you know, and for instance, another video, I got a lot of slack where I said, don't date a girl who tells you that she has been the victim of sexual assault of some sort.
	Because, and I explained it very clear-headedly, which was, you see, there are two possibilities.
	If you go out on a date with somebody, and she immediately tells you that she was the victim of some sexual assault, rape, or something horrible like that, I said you should not date her for a very simple reason.
	There are two possibilities.
	Either she is telling the truth or she is lying.
	Because people lie about all kinds of stuff.
	And a lot of times we lie to make ourselves more interesting.
	And so if she's lying, then she's making herself up.
	She's a fabulous, you don't want to be with somebody like that.
	And don't date her.
	And if she's telling the truth, and it's the first thing she tells you on the first or second date, then she has psychological problems that you are not prepared to deal with.
	You do not have the training or experience to deal with.
	And if she's bringing it up right away, don't date her because you will not be able to help her.
	And on the contrary, her problems will become your own and it will affect you negatively in a big, big way.
	And so I made that video, for instance, which I would think that most people would think that it's consensical.
	Perhaps you could say it's a little cold-blooded, which it is, but you have to be realistic in this life.
	You have to understand your own limitations.
	I'm sure you took a lot of heat for that because the overall culture today is, no, you're supposed to save everybody.
	You're supposed to rescue people around you and take on, you know, their trauma because everybody has to be...
	Right.
	That's not fair.
	I mean, like, look at you and I were talking.
	We're a couple of guys talking here.
	And suppose I told you, you know, oh, I have this...
	I don't have this problem, but let's...
	I have a serious heroin problem, man.
	I mean, I need you to help me out.
	Can I crash at your place for a while while I try to wean myself off heroin?
	And I'll do heroin once in a while in the bathroom, but it'll be real quiet.
	What would you say to that?
	Oh, man.
	Heck no.
	Are you kidding me?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And are you evil?
	No, you're being sensible, you know, because if somebody, and remember, this is hypothetical, okay, if somebody comes to you and says that they have a serious drug habit, you just met them, you met them, I don't know, bowling or, you know, at the corporate, you know, weekend baseball or something like that.
	And you get to be friends with somebody, you know, you have a great time, and then he says, you know, I need somebody to help me out with my heroin addiction.
	You'd be like, I'm sorry, man.
	I mean, I'll get you the number for some good psychiatrist or some, you know, a rehab center, but I'm not going to let you move into my house and move into my life and potentially wreak havoc.
	You see?
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	No, you can't take that on.
	And so...
	Yeah, and so I did this video, and oh man, I was like evil incarnate.
	I was like the most evil, evil person ever, okay?
	And it's like, you know, no, it's being sensible.
	But again, like you say, you're expected to save everyone.
	There are, on the one hand, unrealistic expectations on young men that they have to save everybody.
	And on the other hand, contradicting that, there's the notion that, oh, you're an idiot.
	You're a guy.
	You know nothing.
	You're a fool.
	You're stupid.
	You're useless.
	You're just excess baggage.
	Well, we're part of a society where we're always told that everybody is special.
	And I'll take heat for saying this, but matter of fact, some people, not so special.
	In fact, a whole lot of people are not special at all.
	Now, the people listening to this are probably pretty exceptional individuals, especially...
	For the length that we've been talking here, they're interested in thinking, right?
	But the average oblivious person doesn't actually matter.
	Really don't matter.
	No, I mean, look, in statistics, there's what's known as the Pareto distribution.
	And the Pareto distribution is an 80-20 rule, okay?
	That in any group of people, you take, you know, a thousand random people, and 200 of them are going to be fairly exceptional in any quality you care to name.
	Maybe they run faster, maybe they have better eyesight, maybe they make more money.
	It doesn't matter what the quality is.
	20% is going to be much, much better.
	And the 80% are going to go right on down the line.
	Okay?
	I mean, like, for instance, in my case, I have horrible eyesight.
	I mean, horrible.
	I'm near the bottom of the Pareto curve, right?
	And, you know, my sister, she has better than 20-20 vision.
	She can see, like, Jesus.
	She can read a newspaper from across the room for quite a while, right?
	And so, you see, we are all different, right?
	We are all different.
	And some of us have more qualities or less qualities, as the case may be.
	And a natural part of growing up is bumping up against your limitations and realizing, hey, you know, I'm not good at this.
	Early on as a child, and I remember very clearly in second grade, I realized I was just not a fast runner.
	And there was no way that I would ever be fasting.
	Because there were other kids who would just smoke me.
	And we're talking seven-year-old kids, eight-year-old kids.
	I forget the age.
	I remember I was in second grade.
	But, you know, the point remains.
	We all have limitations.
	And what's important in education is learning our limitations.
	Just as it's important to learn by discovering our limitations, by bumping up against all the things that we are limited in, we eventually hit upon those things that we're actually good at.
	And we realize, oh, you know, I suck at, my eyesight is terrible and I suck at running, but I'm very good at, in my own case, I'm good at writing.
	You know, I'm good at other things.
	You see?
	But our educational system has become this, you know, a trophy for all, participation trophies.
	And so it's pernicious to children and young men because they never learn their limitations.
	And they become afraid of bumping up against their limitations.
	Because their whole lives they are taught not to bump up against their limitations.
	Because, you know, here's a trophy.
	Don't cry.
	But you see, crying over a failure is a natural part of life.
	And you want to have that happen to you when you're young.
	See?
	Because it's not going to hurt that bad.
	Not when you're working at Goldman Sachs.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so, like, you know, the story I was telling you about that street scuffle of some sort and this girl, this skinny young woman who's short and skinny and got into the fray as if she was actually going to make a difference, she had not been taught her limitations.
	Right?
	To turn it back to the leadership class, they do not understand their limitations.
	They think that American power, Western power, is limitless, and that it has no limits whatsoever, and therefore they can do whatever they want.
	And all of a sudden they're shocked and panicked over the fact that the Western power, economic power, is certainly limited, extremely limited.
	And we're seeing this now.
	And it's a failure of our society that we feel bad when the little kid cries because he doesn't win in the 100-meter race.
	He comes in dead last.
	We feel bad for him.
	That's understandable.
	I mean, you would be inhuman if you didn't.
	But what is the correct approach is to explain to them, look, you suck at running.
	Big deal.
	There are lots of other things that you're going to be good at, and you suck at this.
	But instead of doing that, we give them a participation program.
	And we make them feel as good, if not better, than the winner.
	And this also has a pernicious effect on the winner, on the people who are better.
	Because they realize, well, it doesn't matter if I give it my best effort.
	I'm going to get the same medal as the guy who came in last, so I'm not going to really try.
	Why would I bother trying?
	Yes.
	No, it's about trying to push the equality of outcomes to say that no matter what your ability, you all deserve the same rewards or recognition, more importantly, in this area.
	Gonzalo, I hate to interrupt because we've got to wrap this interview up, but we have to continue at some point because this is a fascinating discussion.
	We started out with Ukraine and Russia, and we went through so many scenarios here, and now we're talking about culture and essentially philosophy and society.
	You are a fascinating individual.
	I love being able to wrap with you on all these things.
	I take a lot of drugs, man.
	I'm stoned right now.
	I'm stoned on coffee.
	My caffeine has worn out now.
	It's so late in the morning here in Texas.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I forgot what time it was over there.
	I'm so sorry.
	I know it's quite all right.
	I do this late at night on purpose, but it also allows me to be able to interview people like you who are in Europe in your timeline so you don't have to stay up crazy hours.
	No, it's been my pleasure.
	And I'm so sorry to have kept you up.
	No, this has been incredibly enjoyable.
	I just want to make sure we can do it again, and especially as your book comes out.
	And so, you know, we'll reach out to you to do this again.
	But also, I want to invite you, if you've got something that you're dying to share with us, and I think you'll get a very big reaction from this interview, please reach out and we can get you on, you know, almost any time.
	Sure, it'd be my pleasure.
	Thank you so much.
	That's such a kind offer.
	I very much appreciate it.
	I'm going to take you up on it, Leon.
	Please do.
	You're fool enough to give this incredibly kind invitation, but you're a fool because I'm going to take advantage of it to the hilt.
	So that's a threat.
	That's not a promise, that's a threat.
	Okay, all right.
	No, I'm serious about that, so please do so.
	Come on.
	My pleasure.
	My real pleasure.
	But you've got to give me...
	You've got to post a couple of your own videos.
	Because I'm going into a little bit of Gonzalo Lira video drought right now.
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	Do a couple of those.
	This book has got me totally wrapped up.
	If you want, I'll tell you.
	There are four essays, and it's about, number one, ethics.
	I'm going to finish them simultaneously, because they're just supposed to be one thing, but it's grown into these four book-linked essays.
	The first one is about ethics.
	The second is about industrial society and the pros and cons of it.
	Because we live in an industrial society.
	This industrial society that we have is incredibly efficient in providing us with goods and services and making our lives filled with comfort.
	Common people today live in ways that an ancient king could not dream of living.
	Forget about the technology of iPhones and stuff like that.
	I'm talking about clean water, the best food from all sorts of places.
	Industrial society has been very beneficial, but it's come at enormous costs.
	And so that's the second essay.
	And the third and fourth essays are about the Western leadership class and why they have driven us off a cliff.
	And I'll tell you right now, they're going to be extremely controversial.
	And I'm going to get a lot of slack.
	I'm definitely going to be canceled because of that.
	Well, good.
	And I think you gave us, maybe tonight, here a little bit of a preview of some of the topics you're going to touch on in the books.
	Yeah, because a lot of the stuff I've been chewing on it, you know, munching on it like a cow for months now.
	So, yeah, I can talk about this stuff all day because it's part of these essays that I might.
	But, yeah, I'll take you up on your offer.
	Thank you so much.
	Okay.
	Well, that's excellent.
	So, if you're going to be canceled, you're going to become, what, the Salman Rushdie of Western culture?
	Is that?
	No, no, no.
	They're going to hate my guts for it.
	I mean, I'm under no illusions.
	And in fact, what I plan to do is I'm going to release these essays for free because I'm interested in people engaging with what I have to say.
	And also because if I try to make any money off of them, I'll be cancelled even quicker.
	Oh, yeah.
	But if I just release them for free and have anybody read them and...
	Engage with the ideas that I talk about.
	I think that's the only way that I'll avoid the ban hammer, at least initially.
	Because I think that...
	Look, the title of one of them, of the fourth one, is enough to get me labeled all kinds of nasty things.
	The title alone will be enough to get me cancelled, permanently cancelled.
	And they'll call me the worst names imaginable and all the rest of it.
	Because, you see...
	How can I put it?
	I am not against anybody or anything.
	The kind of life that I live, I can live completely independent from...
	I am literally a lone and drifting Adam in this world, okay?
	And so this affords me a privilege of being able to actually speak my mind and say exactly what I see.
	Because I'm not interested in making up stories of fantastical things.
	I can do that.
	I can write novels, no problem.
	But I'm not interested.
	I'm interested in looking at the world as it actually is and putting that down on paper.
	And that very fact of Of approaching things as they actually are and not as we would wish them to be or as we lie to ourselves that they are.
	I'm interested in the truth as an end in itself.
	And quite frankly, I realize that I have a limited time on this earth, so I might as well use it productively for something worthwhile.
	So that's why I'm writing these essays.
	And yeah, when they come out, you'll know.
	You'll know.
	Okay.
	There's going to be a lot of manure flung my way.
	It'll be fun, actually.
	So yeah.
	Well, post them on Substack, and then we can test the free speech capacity of Substack.
	No, no.
	Substack wouldn't allow them.
	No, really?
	Yeah, just for the title.
	Just for the title.
	Wow.
	Okay, you've got me wondering.
	That's a really great teaser there, Gonzalo.
	You're actually a really good marketer for a book that's not yet done.
	I suppose so, yeah.
	No, if all goes well, I should have it done by the spring.
	And, yeah, because it's long.
	It's long, long.
	So, you'll see it soon.
	I think people will enjoy it.
	They enjoy this conversation.
	I think they'll enjoy these essays.
	If NATO launches artillery, and I mean NATO, if they take out the power grid in your city to shut you up, we'll know why.
	Yes.
	They don't want you to have electricity to finish your book.
	Yeah, it's all about me.
	You know?
	Because, you know, I could have been in Antarctica and there'd be a war going on around me.
	They would have melted the ice for you.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Screw global warming.
	Get the lira die in Antarctica.
	Anyway, it's been a delight.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you for taking the time and your thoughts and your courage and all of that for being uncensored.
	Thank you so much.
	Well, there we go, folks.
	Hope you enjoyed that interview.
	And my apologies.
	I was getting kind of sleepy-eyed at the end of that thing because I was up really, really late Texas time while Gonzalo was enjoying his morning coffee in Ukraine.
	I was like, I can't stay awake.
	But we had a great time, great conversation.
	Hope you enjoyed it.
	Hope you learned a lot from it.
	I'm going to have Gonzalo back.
	We'll talk about what's going on.
	We'll see where things are in the world.
	Overall, I want you to know that both he and I, we pray for the peace of the Ukrainian people.
	We pray for an ending of the suffering.
	We don't want to see any conflict in the world.
	We would rather everybody get along, but it's got to be based on reason.
	It's got to be based on principles of Civilization and civility.
	You know, we're all enslaved right now under these tyrannical globalist rulers and incompetent national leaders and so on.
	So, of course, there's going to be all kinds of human suffering.
	And especially with all the money printing and all the government theft and all the censorship and everything else that's going on, the culture wars, targeting your children, the whole thing.
	I mean, yeah, most of the suffering in the world comes from You know, incompetent rulers who make bad decisions, and we'd all be better off if they just left us all alone, frankly.
	But that is not to be.
	In any case, I conduct about five interviews a week.
	With, I think, fascinating people.
	Very informative people.
	If you'd like to check out my other interviews, my channel is on Brighteon.com.
	It's called HR Report, which stands for Health Ranger Report.
	And I've got a channel on Bitchute and also on Rumble.
	And also you can get the podcast audio versions of everything at HealthRanger.com or check out my website, NaturalNews.com.
	Or check out my online store with hundreds of lab-tested organic foods and superfoods and personal care products that we manufacture in Texas.
	That's healthrangerstore.com.
	Thank you for all your support.
	Hope you enjoyed this interview.
	There's a lot more coming, and we hope to have Gonzalo Lira back again soon with more commentary.
	Have a great weekend, everybody.
	God bless you.
	Take care.
	A global reset is coming.
	And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
	It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
	You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
	I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
	I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
	So download this guide.
	It's free.

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